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THE FACTS; 



OE, 



AT WHOSE DOOE DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 



WHO PROFITS BY SLAVE LABOK? 
WHO INITIATED THE SLAVE TRADE? 
WHAT HAVE THE PHILANTHROPISTS DONE? 

THESE QUESTIONS ANSWERED, 



GEO. FRANCIS TRAIN. 

AUTHOR OF "YOUNG AMERICA ABROAD," " YOUNG AMERICA IN WALL STREET,' 
" SPREAD EAGLEISM," " YOUNG AMERICA AND OLD ENGLAND." 



* 



NEW YORK: 

R. M. DE WITT, 160 & 162 NASSAU STREET. 

LQNTDON: TKUBNER & CO. 

LIVERPOOL: ADAM HOLDEN". 

to 




%J^/l^f^jC^^r^^^i /<?./, 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1800, by 
ROBERT M. DE WITT, 
In the dark's Office of the District Court of the United State, L the Soothe , , 
New York. 



W. B. Tixson, Stereotyper. 




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Ub 



The following Letters appeared in the Liverpool 
"Northern Daily Times," and were not intended for 
general circulation in the form of a pamphlet at that 
time. The author, however, had a few hundred copies 
struck off from the same type for private use, and the 
hurry of a daily paper will account for any inaccuracies 
which appeared in the first issue. These, however, have 
been corrected, and, after a careful revision, and adding 
a concluding chapter on recent events, are presented to 
the public as an honest attempt to throw light upon a 
subject which, while all discuss, so few understand. 



THE FACTS; 

OR, 

AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 



As absence from England will prevent me from accepting a 
courteous invitation to deliver a lecture in Staffordshire, on Sla- 
very, will you permit me to avail myself of the columns of your 
liberal journal to express a few passing thoughts on a subject that 
every English author misrepresents, and every American gets 
black-balled for, the moment the two countries aro discussed at 
your social board. 

The " Northern Times" invites comment on any question of 
importance, and has the reputation of being impartial ; in fact, 
friendly to American interests — hence I am led to believe that a 
few facts, a few suggestions, a few good-natured remarks, that 
might be passed over an English dinner-table, will be as interest- 
ing to your readers as the Dinner question, the War question, 
the Social Evil question, or the question of Reform. 

That the Anti-slavery party do not understand the question 
which they discuss — that they are ignorant of the workings of 
the peculiar institution — that their education has warped their 
judgment — that their pet theme has become threadbare — that 
their emancipation schemes have all been failures— that their 
platform is based on theory instead of practice — that they have 
played so long on a harp of a thousand strings, they believe in 



6 THE FACTS ; OK, 

the picture which their imagination has excited — that their che- 
rished plans have not succeeded : all these are among the facts 
one observes in reading the " Times," or perusing their more 
recent proclamations and manifestoes. No one doubts their 
honesty — no one breathes a whisper against their desire to bene- 
fit mankind — no one thinks for a moment but that they mean all 
they say ; yet all their arguments float upon the surface ; which 
is naturally the case, when for two generations they have only 
heard one side of the question. 

I do not propose to take it up as an American or an English- 
man, but as a Cosmopolitan, omitting nationalities, so that I may 
deal with it purely in an academic way, and in perfect good 
nature. 

No one will deny the feeling that exists in England toward 
America, arising out of the incendiary documents that period- 
ically issue from Exeter Hall. Thousands of Englishmen would 
feel differently toward us were it not for the continual fanning 
of a flame that should have gone out long ago. Answer me this 
— What good has the Uncle Tom Cabin party accomplished ? 
Have they loosened the bonds of the slave ? Have they improved 
the condition of the negro, either at home or abroad ? Has their 
philanthropy succeeded ? The " Times " says not. Thousands 
of Englishmen indorse the opinion of their leader. Still a few 
enthusiasts in high places continue to ignore and abuse America, 
simply, because of the four millions of slaves, which England 
originally placed on our plantations. 

When we remember the meetings held by the negropolists, the 
inflammatory speeches delivered, pamphlets printed, books pub- 
lished ; when we listen to the sweeping comments made against 
the southern States ; the hot arguments and severe denunciations 
hurled at the southern planters ; when I see the best sentiments 
of a great nation twisted and warped by thirty years of negro- 
mania, by the negropolist causing little children to grow up with 
the same ideas as their fathers, it would seem to me that 'tis 
time to reflect and see if Americans deserve all this obloquy. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 7 

Slavery is no new institution. It is as old as the creation of 
man ; the world of the geologists is the only thing more aged. 
All ages have owned their slaves. Examine the archives of 
time. 

Chaos before Cosmos — Then the lower animals. Then man 
concentrating something from all, but created in the image of his 
Creator. Man required society. Society must have laws. Laws 
constitute government. Hence government is civil law, control- 
ling property, liberty, life. This was the primitive state. The 
people elect governors, the most athletic are chiefs. First it was 
physical courage, then mental energy, superiority. Hence sla- 
very. 'You find it in every age. From Chaldea it went to 
Egypt, to Arabia, to all Eastern lands, and finally all over the 
world. I found them everywhere in my travels, but under dif- 
ferent names. In Homer's day all war prisoners in Greece were 
slaves. The Lacedaemonian youth were trained, were taught to 
trap them, to deceive them, and then to butcher them. Think 
of 3,000 being murdered at one time by the brave young Spartans, 
merely as a matter of amusement ; and yet notice how Greek 
and Latin authors dwell upon the manliness of the ancients! 
Think of Alexander, when razing Thebes, some 335 years before 
our era, selling the whole population into abject slavery! Think 
of chaining slaves to a great man's mansion, to give admittance 
to the guests that came to his banquet; and this in much-lauded 
ancient Rome! Imagine Lord Palmerston's guests at Cambridge 
House ushered in by slaves in chains, as in the olden time! Why, 
one of the laws of the XII. Tables was, that insolvent debtors 
were seized and bound into slavery till they worked out their 
debt; and Pollio threw the slaves that gave him offence into his 
fish-pond, to fatten his lampreys; and this only 42 years before 
Christ! Twelve years before that, Ccecilius Isidorus left 4,116 
slaves in his will, to his heir. This was in the clays of the 
Romans — the barbarous, yet history-exaggerated, civilized Ro- 
mans ! 

Dr. Morton says, " Twenty-two centuries before .Christ we see 



8 THE FACTS ; OK, 

on the monuments of Egypt, Caucasian and Negro as master 
and slave." 

Observe in Gliddon's Types of Man, a picture of a negro 
dancing in hand-cuffs in the streets of Thebes, three thousand 
four hundred years ago ! See the inscription on the vases found 
in the Tombs of Etruria. The negro is always painted a slave. 
He is shown in the Tombs of the Kings as he now remains, with- 
out one progressive step. 

But let us not trust to profane historians: take sacred writers. 
Eead the Bible, and observe the bondsmen — the laws that regu- 
lated their sale and purchase. Notice the numbers owned by 
Abraham, by Isaac, by Jacob. Moses, too, had so many, he 
made laws to guide the slave-owner. AVhat were the bonds- 
men and bondsniaids of the ancients but slaves ? Dr. Wayland 
says that the Hebrews held slaves since the conquest of Canaan. 
Abraham owned one thousand. Even Whitfield did not call it 
a sin. Read 25th Leviticus — read 21st Exodus — where the 
slave is called money — " where his master shall bore his ear 
through with an awl, and he shall own him forever." Poly- 
gamy, divorce, murder, incest, the Bible precepts forbade, but 
placed no ban on slavery. I find no law against it in the Scrip- 
tures. Even Moses delivered up a fugitive slave ; but it does 
not follow that I advocate it. The fact is, men in our day would 
be hung for what then hardly occasioned a rebuke. 

'* Servants obey your masters," was the Divine Law, and St. 
Paul indorsed it. 

If the author of Christianity had not approved of it, His good- 
ness and His honor must necessarily have rejected it. 

The Old Testament sanctioned it — the New gives no word or 
sign against it — but laws regulating it are recorded in both. 
St. Paul had time to give directions about the cut of a coat, or 
to say polite words to King Agrippa, but nowhere records any- 
thing against slavery ; on the contrary, in his letter to his friend 
Philemon, to whom he consigns his own son Onesimus — " whom 
I have begotten in my bonds." Does he not say, " which in 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 9 

time past was to thee unprofitable, but now profitable, to thee 
and ine ?" 

One would suppose that slavery is purely of American origin, 
if trained by the modern philanthropists, but it seems to be a 
plant of very ancient growth. But pass by the barbarous days : 
come back to Christian England. Saxon Alfred made laws as 
to sale of slaves ; and it is well known that in Saxcm and Nor- 
man times the children of the English peasantry were sold in the 
Bristol market like cattle for exportation ! Some went to Ire 
land, some to Scotland. Wat Tyler's rebellion, in 1381, arose 
from serfdom. Edward VI. branded V on the breast of any one 
who lived idle for three days, and the buyer owned him for two 
years as his slave. He could oblige him to work by beating and 
chaining him ; let him absent himself for a fortnight, and, with 
a brand upon his cheek, he was made a slave forever ! His neck, 
his leg, or his arm could be circled with rings of iron ; and these 
were Saxon England's laws ! Even in 154 1 a runaway appren- 
tice became by statute a slave. I have jotted down these facts 
for the benefit of the rising generation, to show them that Amer- 
cans, bad as they are represented, did not, at least, originate 
slavery. 

Living in a Christian age, we see the evil of the ancient ways. 
But Christian England should have shown a better example. 
'Tis true the Portuguese, in 1481, began the slave trade from 
Congo and Angola, but the English soon profited by that ex- 
perience. Sir John Hawkins, in October, 1563, had the honor, 
or rather the shame, of introducing it. English gentlemen sub- 
scribed the money, and three English ships landed the negroes at 
Hispaniola— taking home hides, sugar, ginger, and other mer- 
chandise. So say the historians Bell and Hakluyt. Queen 
Elizabeth seemed proud of the trade, for she was an accomplice ; 
so were all the Georges. The diamonds in the Royal Crown 
were bought with the proceeds arising from the sale of negroes. 
When the United States were three years old, England had 130 
ships in the traffic. Yes, in 1786, Anti-Slavery England carried 

1* 



10 THE FACTS ; OR, 

42,000 slaves to America. Africa exported that year 100,000. 
(In 1168, the annual export was 104,000, but the year men- 
tioned is as stated.) From 1192 to 1801, 3,500,000 were torn 
from Africa, and all that did not die or perish, were landed in 
America by Englishmen. But a better view of the extent of the 
trade is seen when England impoverished so many planters, and 
ruined so many States, in the £20,000,000 Bill, by liberating 
110,280 slaves. This was August 1st, 1834. But let us go 
back and see if she abolished the accursed traffic before her 
neighbors. I fear not ; we shall see. No ; Austria was the 
first to do it in 1182 — despotic Austria set the example. Who 
followed ? Why my native State Massachusetts, in 1783 — the 
year of her birth. In 1190, other States did the same. July 
30th, 1181, in territory northwest of Ohio, slavery was forbid- 
den. The French Convention abolished the trade in 1194. 

In 1800, other American States tried to be relieved and shake 
it off ; but Louisiana coming into the Union three years after, 
checked the movement. All this time England was pouring the 
slaves into every American port. English merchants, English 
ships, English sailors, were earning fortunes in firmly planting- 
slavery in our soil. Where did the ancestors of the Tobins, the 
Horsfalls, the Littledales, the Mosses, the Moores, etc., make 
their princely fortunes ? Did not the late Sir John Tobin com- 
mand an African slaver ? Was not his brother, Mr. Thomas 
Tobin, similarly engaged ? What gave fortunes to the early 
Bristol shipowners but the African slave trade ? Refer to 
" Baines' History of Liverpool," p. 695. After the colonization 
of Barbadoes and Antigua, in 1623, the English merchants 
plunged into the trade as eagerly as the Portuguese and 
Spaniards had done, and French and Dutch were doing contem- 
poraneously. London and Bristol held the trade for a century ; 
but, in 1108, sixty years after the settling of Barbadoes, and 
100 after Jamaica's conquest, Liverpool entered the list. It is 
just 146 years since Queen Anne announced to the House of 
Lords the favorable terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, viz., " that 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 11 

England should have Newfoundland, Hudson's Bay, Nova Scotia, 
Gibraltar, Port Mahon, and also the right of furnishing South 
America with slaves from Africa." In 1152, in Liverpool 101 
merchants, 135 in London, and 151 in Bristol, were engaged in 
the traffic, as " a company of merchants trading to Africa." 
That year, eighty-eight vessels were engaged in slave commerce. 
Page 119, Baines says that the average number taken from 
Africa annually, from 1183 to 1193, was 14,000, " whilst America, 
nobly to her credit, had declared the slave trade piracy." " Out 
of 814,000 negroes conveyed from Africa to the West Indies 
during 11 years, Liverpool had the profit and disgrace of tak- 
ing 401,000 !" In round numbers £13,000,000 in 11 years ! 
Americans protested, but in vain. England persevered, as she 
does still with the opium traffic. Because it paid. 'Tis true the 
question was debated in the British Parliament in 1181, also in 
April, 1191, for two days, and again, April 3, 1198, when by a 
vote of eighty-four to eighty-three, Wilberforce's motion was re- 
jected. Grenville and Fox tried it again, March 31, 1806, the 
interval having been employed in cargo after cargo being landed 
in America — and it was not till March 25, 1801, that England 
followed Austria, France, and America, in giving up the traffic ! 
Even to the last hour she was landing negroes. It was too pro- 
fitable — it paid too well to give it up. The allies at Vienna in 
1815 declared against the black slaves, but kept their white serfs ! 
Napoleon, during the hundred days, decreed against slavery. 
Spain in 1811, Netherlands in May, 1818, and Brazil in Novem- 
ber, 1826, made similar demonstrations. (Clay's Missouri com- 
promise was passed February, 1820. Texas, December 25, 1845, 
acted the same comedy over, and another compromise came with 
California in 1850. December, 14, 1856, Congress voted 181 to 
38 against reviving the slave trade.) But France, in June, 1851, 
introduced it under the name of free negroes from Guadaloupe 
and Martinique, but Napoleon, after insulting Great England, 
and bullying little Portugal — re '■ Charles et Georges" captured 
with 110 slaves at Conducia — has since discontinued it ; yet, 



12 THE FACTS ; OR, 

while I write, the Imperial flag floats over the French slave pens 
on the Mozambique coast ! I give these dates to show the dif- 
ferent stages of the institution in different countries, and have 
made them as telegramic as possible. 



I think I have stated enough to prove that, to say the least, 
Americans were not guilty of introducing slavery into America. 
I want the children of England (grown people are supposed to 
be informed on this point) to understand this before they form 
ideas prejudicial to my countrymen on that account. 

I want to have the young people of England know the truth 
regarding us. I want them to know that England brought the 
negroes from Africa— sold them in America — introduced slavery 
on our plantations — forced it upon the colonists against their 
will (it was one of the grievances in the Declaration of 
Independence), and continued to bring them to America long 
after our States had pronounced the trade piracy. 

Moss and Gladstone got the better of Lord Stanley (now 
Lord Derby), in that Demerara calculation, by receiving pay- 
ment according to production of the slaves. Emancipation in 
the West Indies was a job — and the philanthropists unwittingly 
became the tools of the commission-merchants. 

England was the robber — and now cries to America " stop 
thief." What good, says she, can come out of Nazareth ? How 
often do we hear her express her thanks, that she is not like 
these poor Nazarenes. 

Mark this fact, England got rich, before she became philan- 
thropic. She paid away £20,000,000— but 800,000 slaves at 
£15 is £60,000,000. Even at these figures you observe she 
was £40,000,000 richer by the traffic ! But history records 
that this noble act of hers was a mistake ; Emancipation has 
proved abortive. West Indian planters have told me of its 
devastating workings. It was a job — Bankers, Merchants, 
Agents, became enriched in England by impoverishing the plant - 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 



13 



ers in the West Indies. Look at St. Domingo under the French 
observe the falling off in exports, industry and commerce. 
James Franklin is authority for these figures : 



Produce. 


French. 
1791 


Toussaint. 
1802 


Dessalines. 
1804 


Bower. 
1822 




lbs. 


lbs. 


lbs. 


lbs. 


Sugar 


163,405,220 


53,400,000 


47,600,000 


652.541 


Coffee 


68,405,180 


34,370,000 


31,000,000 


35,117,834 


Cotton 


6,286.126 


4,050,000 


3,000,000 


891,950 



What a fall was there my countrymen ! 

Read Lord Stanley's report. Twice he has examined the 
matter under parliamentary orders, and twice he has reported 
that emancipation was a failure. Read the historian Allison. 

11 The negroes," says he, " who in a state of slavery were 
comfortable and prosperous beyond any peasantry in the world, 
and rapidly approaching the condition of the most opulent serfs 
of Europe, have been, by the act of emancipation, irretrievably 
consigned to a state of barbarism." And yet the Emancipa- 
tionists persist in celebrating the anniversary thereof. 

The evidence of travellers, of parliamentary committees, of 
merchants and others best able to speak upon the subject, testify 
that, physically, mentally, morally and financially they have 
degenerated under the system. England made a mistake, and 
no one knows it better than herself. The motive was noble, 
was generous, was grand, but unfortunately the results have 
been the ruin of thousands. England knows this — hence her 
sensitiveness. The original error was in thinking the white and 
black man identical in race and equal in mind. 

Read the London " Times," December, 1852 : "If there is 
one thing in the world that the British public do not like to 



14: THE FACTS ; OR, 

talk about, or even to think about, it is the condition of the 
men for whom this great effort was made." 

The exports of Jamaica fell off in 1839, the first year after 
the act came into operation, 8,466 hogsheads, and year by year 
thereafter, in greater proportion. What is their condition to- 
day ? A garden changed into a desert ! Look over the par- 
liamentary records — bankers became bankrupt, planters saw 
their plantations turned to jungles, weeds grew up instead of 
sugar, roads became impassable, fences were broken down, fields 
ran to waste, and, instead of activity, industry, progress, you 
see nothing but desolation, sloth, decay. Am I coloring the 
picture ? No. Lord Derby knows that it is true. 

Great as was the falling off in sugar, greater was the fall in 
morality and virtue. 

Mark the changes : in 1189 the sugar export was 61,200,000 
lbs. ; in 1832 it dwindled down to nothing. 

Dr. Channing, in 1840, said the act of emancipation was 
greater than that of releasing the Israelites from bondage. But 
were he alive to-day, I am sure he would be disappointed to see 
how badly his philanthropy has worked for the slave as well as 
for the white man. The sudden jump from boncfege to freedom 
cannot work. The slaves of Barbadoes had been preparing for 
freedom for years — hence that island compares so favorably 
with Jamaica. If Barbadoes gained, Jamaica lost. When 
rebuking the abolitionists, no longer ago than the 21th. of last 
month, the "Times" says— " That they not only emancipated 
every negro in the West Indies, but that they have pretty well 
ruined every planter to boot." And, even the other day, in the 
debate on the Jamaica Emigration Bill, the Earl of Airlie said, 
so disastrous was the Act upon the property, that " the fee 
simple would be given now, for one year's rental formerly I" No 
one will stand forth to-day to say that West Indian Emancipa- 
tion has benefited the negro there, but on the contrary all 
lament the results. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 15 

Robespierre and Brissot, in 1191, tried the equalizing princi- 
ple in St. Domingo — and Alison has vividly painted the massacre. 
Speaking of the Haytian drama, "the negroes," said he, 
" marched with spiked infants on their spears, instead of colors ; 
they sawed asunder the male prisoners, and violated the females 
on the dead bodies of their husbands." They found by this sad 
experience that liberty was one thing, abolition another. 

These negro revolutions are horrible to relate ; fire first, then 
murder, after torture, rape, mutilation I This island is a living 
history of negro ignorance, negro iudolence, and negro atrocity. 
The first revolution was Nov. 21, 1522, the negroes seizing arms 
and murdering overseers as usual. In 1619, Padrejan stabbed 
his master as a signal, and massacre reigned supreme. He stood 
a long time at bay in his intrenchments at Tortugas until mur- 
dered by the buccaniers. Then came the insurrection of Polydor 
about 1100. But Vincent Oje was the greatest ruffian of them 
all. The Amis des noirs at Paris furnished money, and well he 
did his work. Toussaint L'Ouverture was at work at the nortli 
of the island, and Rigaud, the mulatto, at the south. 

These facts show what the negro can do in Butchery. 

Jamaica has not escaped. Cudjoe and his assassins from 1694 
to 1138, kept the whites in a Reign of Terror for over forty 
years ; again, on Easter Monday, 1160, while all were at supper, 
Tackey and Jamaica, two Coramantee negroes, at the head of 
their brigands, seized the fort at Port Maria, destroyed the gar- 
rison, murdering in all some ninety whites ! 

In 1824 the two Hayti scamps were discovered just as the 
torch was ready to burn down the town. Twelve hundred 
negroes were in the plot. 

The Maroon war of 1195 ; the seizure of Lord Balcarra's slave 
in 1801, the plot of 1809, are episodes in the brutal picture of 
the negro's life. 

These Maroons ruled supreme in St. Domingo for eighty-five 
years. The French and Spanish combined to subdue them. 
These runaway negroes liked their African mode of bloodshed. 



16 THE FACTS ; OR, 

Barbadoes can also testify to the brutality of the negro 
character. Had not the plot of 1649 been discovered, all the 
whites would have perished, and the hauging of forty of the ring- 
leaders in 1G89 saved the island a second time. Then " the hand- 
somest of the white women were to be reserved for their desires," 
says the historian. In 1702 they were equally unsuccessful. 

Martial law, organization of the militia, hanging of the chiefs, 
was the only salvation to this island in 1816. Parliamentary 
speeches started it, and on Easter day the destruction was to 
commence. 

The fires swept over the plantations, burning down sugar-mill 
and cottage in all directions — all for the Wilberforcean theory, 
that a negro is equal to a Caucasian ! 

The slave States are not barren of negro insurrections. In 
1112 the negroes prepared to burn down New York, and nearly 
succeeded in 114-1, "all the white men were to be killed, and 
the negroes were to take their wives." Fourteen blacks were 
burned at the stake and eighteen hanged for this little piece 
of mischief, when New York had only 10,000 population. 

Sunday is the day of massacre for this barbarous race — it's 
always on the Sabbath. 

The better the day, the better the deed, guides the negro 
assassin. The Nat Turner affair in Southampton County, Virgi- 
nia, in 1831, was on Sunday. 

Three hundred mounted negroes, armed to the teeth, cut down 
all before them. 

"Whole families, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sucking- 
babies and school-children, were butchered by them, thrown into 
heaps, and left to be devoured by hogs and dogs, or to putrefy 
on the spot." 

In Charleston, S. C, the whites were all to have been mur- 
dered on the 16th June, 1822. As usual the plot was to ripen 
on Sunday : but William, the slave of Mr. Paul, peached and 
saved the city. Dominick Vesey was the leading ruffian of this 
infernal plot. 



A.T WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 17 

Thirty-five leaders were hung and a hundred sent out of the 
State. Only three years ago the people of Arkansas, Louisiana 
and Tennessee were alarmed at rumors of an insurrection to come 
off on Christmas Eve. 

So long as there are negroes and whites in the same country, 
so long may we expect these periodical revolutions. 



Can Exeter-hall point to one single place where emancipation 
has advanced morality or the Christian religion ? Their eyes 
are upon their foreheads — how can they see ? You can elicit 
electric sparks from a block of ice, but it is not easy to make a 
forty-year old abolitionist warm into a common-sense argument 
on the slave question. 

The inventor of the guillotine died by his own hand ; so has the 
negro been demoralized by his emancipators. As the French 
people represent the pendulum in the clock of revolution, so the 
moral changes of the negro show the effect of emancipation. 

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Eomilly, Channing, Wayland, Darwin, 
Phillips— all went too far — they were good men and true, but not 
wise ; one case of cruelty with them was enough for a thousand 
illustrations ! Will their followers go on, learning nothing, for- 
getting nothing? When the time comes that religion shall 
diffuse education without sectarian bias— when they can explain 
man's origin, object, and destiny — when they will practise the 
law they preach, of loving the African as themselves — when these 
things have been clone, we may expect fair and honorable discus- 
sion on this important question. 

Let us see if the abolitionists are consistent (I mean in 
England ; our own people can fire away at each other with bet- 
ter grace). Does charity really begin at home? Who were 
the slave-owners in the beginning ? The English. Who kept 
up the trade after America declared it piracy? The Euglish. 
Who are ostensibly to-day the principal slave-owners ? I still 



18 THE FACTS ; OK, 

answer, the English. If I steal fruit and you partake of it, 
knowing it to be stolen, are you not equally guilty ? Of course 
you are. So England is buying slave-grown sugar aud slave- 
grown cotton — knowing it to be slave-grown — is in reality a 
special partner in the ownership of the slave ! Every extra bale 
of cotton you demand requires one more slave to produce it. 
Two millions of slaves produce 2,000,000 bales : three millions, 
3,000,000 bales, etc. — one bale to every acre — 4,000,000 acres 
gives 4,000,000 bales, and, strange, enough, the same analogy 
applies to slaves. Every extra cent paid on American cotton 
raises the price of the slave $100 ; eight cents are $800 : 
ten, $1,000 ; twelve cents gives his value 1,200. 'Tis easy to 
know the value of slaves by the value of cotton. England is the 
real master of the slave, and yet listen to her moans and groans — 
her deep long sighs for liberty ! But mark — her cries are for 
the liberty of the blacks ! while for the degradation of the white 
Circassian, the yellow Coolie, or red Hindoo, she has naught but 
ecstatic admiration ! See "Lady Londonderry's Travels in the 
East," etc. 

Having made an unfortunate move in the West Indies, she 
wishes her dear cousins in America to do likewise. 

It reminds one of the old iEsopian fable of a certain animal 
who, once upon a time, lost a certain appendage by a trap, 
whereupon he placed his back against a tree, and then and there 
did recommend all other foxes to go at once and have their 
tails amputated in a similar manner! 

The good Duchess of Sutherland clears the peasantry from her 
estates, to make room for the grouse and the season's shooting, 
and then forsooth sends a monster petition, with half a million 
signatures, to the American ladies, to do away with slavery — she 
should have added, "as she has done." "A thin partition, so 
you see, 'twixt Cupid and cupidity." Will she condescend to 
answer the very able reply to that petition, written by the wife 
of an Ex-President*? Her reception of the authoress of " Uncle 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 19 

Tom " has done more to prolong slavery than the noble duchess 
will ever know. Had the Rathbones and the Croppers of the 
anti-slavery party devoted a little more time to the affairs of the 
Borough Bank, and a little less to the "domestic institutions" 
of America, perhaps there would not be to-day so many families 
reduced to beggary, perchance to a servitude, to them much 
more wretched than is his bondage to the African. 

'Tis natural to follow the leader ; and the ideas of the few 
have become maxims with the many. Children have their ears 
wide open, and their memory is like wax to receive impressions, 
and like iron to retain them. Facts are stubborn arguments ; 
I crowd them into this article to show that England herself has 
made the most money out of the slave-trade ; and that it is 
wrong for Englishmen to allow their children to grow up with 
ill-feeling against kinsmen who solicit friendship, on account of 
acts for which their own parents are mostly accountable. Every 
bale of cotton, every hogshead of sugar England buys, is a premium 
on slavery ! 

Be consistent ; tell the truth ; don't exaggerate. Better let 
the left hand know the right hand's movements, than practise 
deception. 

How long is it since the right-of-search question produced 
discord ? 

Is it fair for England to insult America every little while on 
this touchy question ? Lord Brougham thinks so, but not Lord 
Malmesbury. Young England's statesmanship is a decided 
improvement on Old England's. 

To become benefactors of the few blacks, the Exeter Hall 
party would become malefactors of the many whites. While 
they seek to elevate politically, they degrade socially. Where 
is the black man an equal ? They take him from the kitchen to 
scorn him in the drawing-room. This only makes his darkness 
the more visible. Their politics clash with their ethics. Their 
near relations, the Americans, they would sacrifice for their very 
distant acquaintances, the Africans. Such conduct is not con- 



20 THE FACTS J OR, 

sistent. Why is it that the black man must remain in Africa ? 
why is it that he should be imprisoned withiu his own borders ? 
Red men, yellow men, white men, brown meu, emigrate from 
land to laud, under contracts equally binding as slavery. But 
black men, like the Crown-jewels, must be handled in white kids 
and placed in a glass-case to be looked at ! What have the 
abolitionists to say about the coolie trade to Cuba and Callao 
— the Hindostanee trade to the Mauritius — the Boer trade to 
Cape Colony — all of British origin ? I could paint as terrible a 
picture of the Swatau and Macao coolie traffic as the most rabid 
abolitionist cau of African. I have been upon the ground. 
Parliamentary returns give the list of the dead, but say little of 
the misery of the living ! 

Out of 14,000 agricultural laborers in Trinidad, 7,927 were 
from India and China. Between 1845 and 1859, of 11,458 
Chinese and coolie emigrants, 0,278 remained as voluntary emi- 
grants or returned. The African is much better adapted to the 
climate than the Asiatic, and a negro thrives under a sun that 
destroys a coolie ! 

Labor was wanted — supply and demand govern it. Slavery is 
a crime — therefore, slavery in disguise, the coolie trade is intro- 
duced. Measure after measure is brought forward to obtain 
laborers ; and no matter what the system, so long as it is called 
by any other name than slavery. 

The truth is, I have heard the word so often repeated that I 
am disgusted with it ; and I believe if Congress would pass a 
law compelling the slave-owners to be called coolie owners, or serf- 
owners, and the slaves to be called coolies, or apprentices, or serfs, 
or servants, or peons, or colliers, or anything but slaves — I believe 
if this could be done, Exeter-hall would be perfectly happy, and 
the world would revolve on its axis as in the olden time. For 
really it is the sentiment, not the fact, of slavery that occasions 
such clamor I 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 21 

What does England wish America to do with her slaves — 
liberate them ? I think not. 

What does she want ? Do the Clarksonites consider a negro 
equal to an Anglo-Saxon ? If they do, I do not. Do they be- 
lieve that an Anglo-Saxon can be brought down to the level of 
the African without crossing the blood ? They cannot. Then 
how expect the African to rise to their level without mixing the 
stock ? It is unnatural. The moment the white marries the 
black, the white deteriorates in greater ratio than the black 
improves. ? Tis a question of race. There are degrees in nature. 
Can you make a pointer out of a poodle ? Can you get a peach 
out of a crab-apple ? Can you grow an oak from a pea-nut ? 
Can you change a carrot into a melon ? Will a donkey pro- 
duce an Arab horse ? Can you bring a chicken out of an egg 
plant ? Can you make an eagle out of a duck ? A lion from a 
pole-cat ? Most certainly not ; you cannot trifle with nature, 
nor make a " silk purse out of a sow's ear." And it is simply 
impossible for you to change an African into an Anglo-Saxon. 
It is a question of blood — of race ; and a question far above the 
capacity of those who abuse America on account of slavery ! 

When they will explain to me why God, in His wonderful 
wisdom, made one mountain overtop another mountain — formed 
one ocean larger than another ocean — planned one valley wider 
than another valley ; when they can make me understand why 
He made the oak stronger than its neighbor — the rainbow more 
beautiful than the storm cloud — the lily more lovely than the 
lilac ; when they will tell me the reason that Providence 
ordained that the fair Saxon should be permitted to express, in 
the blush upon her face, all the emotions of her soul, while the 
African knows not the signification of the word ; when these 
things are made clear to me, I will admit that the African is 
equal to the Anglo-Saxon race, but not till then ! They were 
born and bred servants — they cannot, without undergoing a 
radical change, be masters. I have been in Africa, and nowhere 
did I learn that the negro had ever been other than a hewer of 



22 THE FACTS ; OR, 

wood and a drawer of water. For forty centuries they have 
borne the burden. We may regret their position, but we can- 
not change the laws of God. The obelisks and hieroglyphics 
of the past have stamped their occupations. They built the 
pyramids. For forty centuries they have been in a state of 
serfdom that their descendants of to-day on the American plan- 
tations would shudder to contemplate ! 

Of the fifty millions now in Africa, some forty millions are 
slaves. It was no unusual thing in former days to see the pens 
where the war-prisoners were stored to fatten preparatory to 
being eaten. They were stall-fed for the market and hung up 
and cut up, as you would sell a sheep or an ox. Young girls 
were considered the greatest delicacies, but when tough with 
age they became beasts of burden. Guilty of all crimes, accus- 
tomed to the lowest acts of barbarians, always at war, strangers 
to education, civilization and Christianity — brutalized by the 
lowest depravity — the question arises, no matter what the mo- 
tive, has not his removal to America bettered the condition, 
improved the morals, elevated the mind of the African ? Has 
not that been the first step toward regeneration ? There can 
be but one response. 

So far as America is concerned — slavery, if not a curse to the 
white man, is, compared to his native habits, a blessing to the 
slave. America is no more a hell to the negro, than Africa is a 
heaven. 

Did you ever hear of a negro who wished to leave civilized 
America to go among the barbarians of Africa ? 

Slavery is the growth of ages. You cannot eradicate it in a 
day. Slavery is the growth of ignorance — not of education. 

Slavery was born in barbarian times. Then it was a scourge, 
and for long it so continued. 

Bancroft says, the Hebrew father could sell his daughter, and 
if he owed money, his wife and mother could be taken in pay- 
ment. 

Virginia to-day is only doing, what Palestine and its adjoin- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 23 

ing lands did so extensively in former days — breeding slaves for 
the market ! But Virginia is civilized, and Palestine is barba- 
rian. My northern education shrinks at such commerce, and J 
can but feel the curse that England stereotyped upon my own land. 
Palestine was, and is, barbarian. Greece was comparatively 
civilized, so much so that she was a slave breeder ! The anger 
of Achilles was aroused while quarreling about a slave. The 
hero of Macedon sold his own kindred into slavery ! 

By the order of nature, certain soils cau only be worked by 
involuntary labor of the black. The white would, perish where 
the black man thrives. No planter would take negroes to 
work in the Free States to compete with the white if even a 
bounty was offered. 

Augustus Caesar sold 36,000 of the Salassians, who dwelt on 
the Alps, into slavery. v 

> Aristotle the pupil of Plato, was a pro-siavery man, and Cato 
was a. large slave-owner. Paulus Emilius, under a power of 
attorney of the Roman Senate, sold 150,000 of the Epirus cap- 
tives to the the slave-dealers of Rome. 

The object of Julius Caesar's invasion of these islands was 
only to procure slaves for the Roman market. 

Asiatics and, Africans were vended in all the marts of Europe 
by Christians 1 After building their palaces on the profits- of 
the slave trade, the Venetians passed a law forbidding a slave 
ever again to so step on board an argosy of Venice. England 
is equally virtuous after she has enriched herself ! 

Jefferson must have got his absurd " Free and equal" clause, 
in the Declaration of Independence, from Pope Alexander III., 
who wrote in the 12th century, " Nature having made no slaves, 
all men have an equal right to liberty." If nature does not 
make slaves, she has been a long time engaged in manufacturing 
apprentices, serfs, and paupers ! But there is one thing to her 
credit which I cannot say of the Buxtonian philanthropists, she 
minds her own business, and makes money by it. 



24 the facts; or, 

I am glad to find that England was not the Adam and Eve 
of original slavery. 

Before Europe there was Africa. Before Africa there was 
Asia. 

The Sclavonic races derive their name from being slaves. 
But Exeter Hall should remember that white men did not in- 
vent negro slavery. As Hebrew enslaved Hebrew, and Greek 
enslaved Greek, so the negroes enslaved their own people, as 
more civilized Anglo-Saxons still virtually make slaves of Anglo- 
Saxons. 

Are the pulpit abolitionists aware that when the Saxons in- 
troduced slavery to England, the " the price of an able bodied 
Englishman was only four times that of an ox V* Are they 
aware, when reviling Americans, that the noble Scots taken on 
the field of Dunbar, were sent and sold as slaves in New 
England ? Do they know that the royal prisoners at the battle 
of Worcester, in spite of Henry Vane's remonstrances were 
shipped to America and sold into slavery ? 

During two centuries the red-men of the West were sold in 
Europe as slaves. " Columbus," says Washington Irving, 
" sent five hundred Indians to Spain f and the account sales 
showed better returns than shipments to Australia now-a-days 
do. Charles V. realized large sums by granting licenses to the 
Flemmiugs to sell slaves. Are the ebony emancipators aware 
that Philip Y. and Queen Anne divided profits on the 144,000 
negroes sent to America under the Asiento Treaty ? Aud when 
Englishmen become loyally national and proudly conscious of 
their possessions in the East, does it ever occur to them that 
the profits of the African slave trade furnished them with the 
original capital to plant the acorn of their Indian Empire ? See 
" Bancroft on the Slave Trade." 

The Caucasian, the Ethiopian, and the American races were 
on the American soil at the same time. While the Pilgrims 
were landing in the North, a Dutch man-of-war carried the first 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 25 

slaves to Virginia. (Query, were they the F. F. Vs. ?) The red 
man is disappearing from the hunting fields ^ the black man 
improves and multiplies on the plantations, while the energy of 
the white man of the West arouses the jealousy and the amaze- 
ment of Europe ! 

The American Indian was not civilization-proof. He was the 
Zebra of the horse tribe, the African was the donkey, and the 
Anglo-Saxon was the Arab steed ! while the mule represents 
the type of the mulatto. 

England's ideas of free trade were once concentrated upon 
free trade in slaves ; now it is free trade in opium. Then it 
was degrading the body — now it is debasing the mind. 

Free negroisra, Free opium, Free rum shops, Free magdalens; 
but taxes on newspapers, taxes on button paper, taxes every- 
where on knowledge. 

Paying two millions for education, half of which she receives 
by taxing the chief medium of education — Paper ! This is as 
inconsistent as the wail for the negro. Anti-slavery clubs are 
mutual admiration societies. Notice the working of the Emanci- 
pation Act on the people. 

This is the account current : 



A feio African trad- 
ers receive for 800,000 
slaves sixty millions ster- 
ling. 



The many English people are taxed to enrich 
a few merchants and bankers in England — 
£20,000,000— which tax ruins the planters of 
Jamaica. 



Now, did not simple justice demand, that Great Britain, 
rather than rob the overtasked masses who derived no profit 
from the slave trade or labor, should have extorted the sum 
from those who had made their fortunes in the infernal traffic ? 

England allied herself with Russia against France ; then she 
becomes an ally with France against Russia ; now she is voting 
£10,000,000 to get her navy in order and Lord Cowley has 
gone to Vienna to complete her arrangements for changing 
again. 

2 



26 THE FACTS ; OK, 

She is equally consistent on the slave question. No, I will 
do her justice. It is not noble England, but some of her ignoble 
leaders that misrepresent America. 

The alliance between England and America is an alliance of 
the people. The alliance between France and England is an 
alliance of governments. 

I will do the English the justice to believe, that with all their 
faults they love an American — better than (I was about to 
remark, as much as they hate) — a Frenchman. 

Lord Brougham is a great man — a shining light in England 
— so brilliant as a lawyer — so brilliant as a statesman — and so 
much a favorite with and devoted to the fairer sex ; could he 
not accomplish more good on the Social Evil question, than he 
has ever, or can ever achieve on the slave question ? 

In introducing so many inconsistencies, I hope that I shall 
not become as inconsistent myself, by jumping from point to 
point so rapidly as to confuse my readers. If I have done so in 
this sixty-mile-an-hour essay, and they feel really sorry, I forgive 
them ! My desire is to remind England, on this slave topic, 
that it is not what we have been taught to believe is one of an 
Englishman's noble characteristics of fair play — to continually 
taunt Americans with holes in their elbows, after time has 
patched up their own. 

Admit that slavery is a wrong, would not freedom be a 
greater wrong to those incapable of taking care of themselves ? 
Their Egyptian life was dark as midnight, in comparison to the 
noonday existence of a southern plantation. In Africa they 
lived in misery — in America they are in comparative happiness. 

In their native land they were slaves, as were their grand- 
fathers and great-grandfathers before them — slaves that were 
fed to be eaten or slaughtered for the amusement of their con- 
querors I But in America their fortunes have changed. There, 
in infancy and in old age, in sickness and in health, they are cared 
for, sheltered, and clothed ; neat cottages are provided for them, 
wholesome food is furnished, suitable garments are supplied, and 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 27 

if disease overtakes them, physicians are at hand to administer to 
their sufferings. You may say that self-interest guarantees all 
this. Even so ; is it not better than African wretchedness ? 
Better than the free negro of the North, who may die in want ? 
Better than thousands of white men in this great land, who, 
were it not for the sentiment — the natural repugnance to the 
word slave— would be glad to change places ? Besides, what is 
there in life that self-interest does not prompt ? 

You seldom see drunkenness among the slaves, while the free 
negroes brutalize themselves with drink ! The free negroes con- 
tract vices that the slave would scorn. The slaves are not 
allowed to drink rum. Therefore, the strong law of the planter 
improves the morals of the slave. 

Policy concurs with humanity. The law compels the master 
to protect the slave. The owner is a commissioner of poor-rates 
in the infancy, illness, and old age of the slave, paying their 
rates out of his own pocket. The institution of slavery in the 
southern States gives honor to the man and chastity to the 
woman when compared with the barbarous habits of Africa. 

In all the instances of freed slaves where farms were furnished 
and money until the land yielded, they have turned out failures. 
I would as soon think of allowing one hundred children to regu- 
late their conduct in the world as one hundred negroes freed from 
wholesome rule. 

Is it not in Sacred Writ where it is laid down that every man 
shall do some good to himself or his neighbor ? In Africa the 
the slave would do harm. In America he carries out the Divine 
rule, and under his present life he is obliged to support himself, 
and in doing that, he is made to grow rice, sugar, corn, and 
cotton for his fellow-man, thereby conforming to the great law. 

If any one doubts that the slaves are happy, let him visit them 
while at their meals, or their cottage fire ; let him join in their 
plays, and see the joy of their dances — notice their glee when 
the master returns. 



28 THE FACTS J OK, 

There are thousands of planters who never permit the word 
slave to be used on their plantations : the negroes are spoken of 
as servants. The Texans have just passed a law permitting any 
negro who had purchased his freedom, and wished to return 
again into bondage, to do so — choosing his own master, who 
must agree to give him the necessaries of life in return for his 
labor. Do not be surprised when I tell you that, though this 
law is not two years old, some 103 free negroes have voluntarily 
returned again into slavery. My authority is a wealthy planter at 
present in London. He gave me more instances of those who 
wish to return than those who wished to leave. 

What, I ask of the abolitionists, is a truthful, common-sense 
emancipation scheme, and a sound, practical plan of freedom ? 
Point it out, and I may join them. 

I want them to admit facts — not distort them — admit first, 
that the Englishman is superior to the negro — admit that slavery 
in America is better than freedom in Africa — admit that slavery 
was forced on the Americans by Englishmen — admit that 
Emancipation has not brought the expected results — admit the 
wrong of risking war between two civilized nations on account 
of a ship-load of slaves — admit that there are many white 
laborers in England who have less comforts than the black men 
in America. I want those who abuse America because of her 
slaves, to admit the injustice that is done to America, by laying 
all the crime at her door — if crime it is, to improve the moral 
and social condition of barbarous races. 

Rest assured that slavery is a matter of race. You cannot 
make a white man a slave under many generations ; neither 
can you reverse it with the negro in less time. With Mrs. 
Grundy, I believe in blood. Can you grow an oak in a flower- 
pot ? Tame an eagle in a canary's cage ? or a tiger in a rabbit 
warren ? No. Neither can an Anglo-Saxon be made a slave. 

It is simply a matter of brains. The most intellectual must 
govern. The negro must always remain a servant ; yet Exeter- 
hall would elevate him to mastership, always forgetting that 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 29 

what is contrary to the law of races is contrary to the law of 
God. 

Such advocates would make all men fat or all lean — they 
would have mountains levelled — valleys filled — no short people, 
no long people, but everything on a dead level. This would be 
contrary to nature. Roman noses, and pug noses, French noses 
and flat noses, would all, under their system, be reduced to the 
emancipation shape ! 

What has been will continue — you cannot change in days 
that which centuries have formed. 

Thought is born of experience ; satin is made from the mul- 
berry tree ; and it requires hundreds of years to change the 
negro. 

What has been accomplished by the African race ? Is there 
any evidence of genius, of capacity, or power, on that Continent ? 
No, not one relic ; yes, I will not do them the injustice of omit- 
ting the monument of African skulls, erected by the King of 
Dahomey to his wife's memory ! But there is nothing else. 



By way of parenthesis, you must permit me to take a note of 
"Audi alteram Partem's" letter, in the "Northern Times" of 
Saturday, where Young America gets rapped over the knuckles 
for his "foul aspersions" against the slave-trade, and "base 
assertions " against the anti-slavery party. " Audi " writes well, 
but with the old-fashioned abolitionist pen. 

Before I commence dissecting him, I must ask "Audi" one 
favor— that he will not quote Latin. Like most living men, I 
have a ghost like dread of a dead language. Webster delighted 
in getting off a Latin quotation, and Brougham macadamizes his 
speeches with Greek and Latin. I can rattle through many of 
the living tongues ; but so many people have been poisoned by 
uneducated apothecary boys, by not understanding the Latin 
labels, I have come to the conclusion that Greek and Latin 



30 THE FACTS ; OR, 

ought to be erased from the educational system ! It is an old 
fogy institution to most minds — few understand it. Who ever 
read " Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy " but some rusty Eugene 
Aram student ? I agree with Holmes, 

" That our poor English striped in foreign phrase, 
Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise I" 

(This slight deviation on education is also in parenthesis). 

"Audi" is clever — and puts strong questions. In response 
to my saying that the anti-slavery party did not understand the 
true bearings of the matter, he asks : 

" Did not Granville Sharpe, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and 
the noble army of British abolitionists, from George III. down to the pre- 
sent, understand the question — the practicability, the justice, and Christian 
duty as a nation that had sinned, to abolish the inhuman, soul-destroying, 
God-defying, abominable, piratical, system, the African slave-trade ?" 

Of course they understood it, as " Audi " understands it, in 
theory — not in practice. " Their own friends, and, in some 
cases, relatives, were actually engaged in it all the time." The 
same class of men advocate missionary enterprises to Christianize 
the heathen : one of the most absurd movements of our latter 
days. It is expensive going away so far, when so much can be 
done to Christianize civilization (?) at home. The followers of 
those good men are equally anxious to abolish the opium culture 
and the opium trade ; but the Dents, the Jardines, the Lindseys, 
the Eussells, and the Heards engaged in the mind-destroying, 
body-corrupting traffic, are too many for them, and Lord Elgin 
breaks down objections of the Chinese Cabinet with cannon-balls. 
To-day the opium trade is legalized ! 

The slave-trade paid. Liverpool, London, Bristol, Glasgow, 
earned money in it. Commerce is all-powerful. Although Wil- 
berforce's resolutions (May, 1189) were supported by Burke, 
Pitt, and Fox, the African traders made their voice heard at the 



AT WHOSE DOOE DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 31 

bar of the Commons, and defeated the bill ! Even some seven- 
teen years later, when, by inflaming the people's minds by recitals 
of its horrors, a vote was obtained to abolish the traffic, Liver- 
pool had 111 ships, of 25,949 tons burden, engaged in it ! It 
is well known that, after that date, British subjects carried it 
on, under cover of the Spanish and Portuguese flags ; and it 
was not finally stopped till Lord Brougham, in 1811, passed a 
bill punishing with fourteen years' transportation any subject 
found connected with the importation of negroes ! Vide 
Bandinel. 

Wilberforce was well aware that the English merchants, be- 
tween the years 1100 and 1186, had imported six hundred and 
ten thousand Africans into the island of Jamaica alone! No 
wonder he was horrified at the brutalizing commerce — he knew 
its atrocities — so does " Audi " — so do I; but neither of us know 
how to wash out the stain that England has blotted America 
with. Will the abolition party famish the soap ? Will they 
form a fund — an emancipation fund — out of the profits that have 
been made, to assist us in eradicating the diseases of our 
ancestors ? 

"Audi" continues: 

u Did the whole civilized world, together with ' Young America,' under- 
stand the question when they unanimously declared the slave-trade piracy? 
Were the British anti-slavery party ignorant of the peculiar institution, 
when the whole nation rose up as one man, and demanded its total aboli- 
tion throughout the British dominions ?" 

Yes. Young America understood and stopped it. It was one 
cause of the Revolution. 

George the Third wanted more taxes, and to sell us more 
slaves — so Young America just bowed him out of the country 1 

The emancipation of slavery in the British dominions forced 
a monopoly in favor of the southern States, and in doubling and 
trebling the value of the negro, offered to avarice a premium to 
carry on the illicit trade and renders emancipation impossible. 



32 THE FACTS ; OR, 

The Virginia Legislature by one vote preserved slavery. 
The negroes were a burden at $200 to $300, before the growth 
of cotton — at their present value no voice would be tolerated in 
that State for emancipation. 

Abolition is a beautiful idea. Its results are less enchanting. 
What advantage, asks McCulloch, is derived from " turning a 
laborious, well-fed slave, into an idle, improvident, and perhaps 
beggarly freeman?" He did not believe in the anti-slavery 
party's "substituting abuse for reasoning — assertion for inquiry 
— prejudice for principle." 

Demosthenes, in his second Philippic, said " a slave was better 
off in Athens than a free citizen in many other countries," — and 
I can assure " Audi " that in our day a " a slave is better off on 
the American plantation than the free negro, by the roadside, 
in a Jamaica sun." 

Do the abolitionists imagine that Africa would have been 
improved if the slave trade had never existed ? The exposure of 
infants — human sacrifices — cannibalism — the wholesale slaughter 
of war prisoners, gave way to the profit of the slave trade. Yet 
I abhor the one as much as the other! 

Another quotation from " Audi's " letter : 

" How stands the question in ' Young America ?' Did not Anthony 
Benezet, Dr. Rush, Dr. Franklin, John Woolman, George Washington, 
Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and the Anti-slavery party in the United 
States, understand the question, when negro-slavery, in 1776, reigned pre- 
dominant in the thirteen original States?" 

Most assuredly these men were up and doing. They forced 
England to give it up. They set the example. Those who had 
slaves recommended their neighbors to emancipate ! 

Washington confessed his desire to do something regarding it, 
but said, "it could not be done without legislation." 

Washington was a slave-owner, so was Jefferson. But it was 
too much for either to liberate their slaves during their lifetime. 
I was last at Mount Vernon in 1850, and saw Mr. John Wash- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 33 

ington's slaves hard at it in the corn-field, "fat, ragged, and 
saucy." No wonder, Edward Everett writes for the " Ledger;" 
no wonder the Mount Vernon Society wish to purchase the 
estate, for Plymouth Rock and Mount Vernon are our nation's 
monuments. 

Another paragraph from " Audi " : 

" Did the Anti-slavery party in America understand the question when 
they went on, conquering and to conquer, till they abolished chattel sla- 
very in seventeen out of thirty-two States ? Does Cosmopolitan believe 
that the Young American Anti-slavery party understood the question, 
when, thirty years ago, there was not one open avowed anti-slavery United 
States senator, nor representative in the National Council? Now there 
are twenty-five anti-slavery senators, and one hundred representatives r and 
ere long, by God's blessing, if the anti-slavery element in the United States 
will only remain true to their highest convictions of duty, they will soon 
have a clear working majority in the houses of Congress, with an anti- 
slavery President to enforce the law of universal freedom." 

Is " Audi" aware that six of the original thirteen States are 
still slave States ? That climate, soil, temperature wrought the 
change ? That north of a certain line, where free labor can be 
employed, he will find no slaves ? That every new northern 
State will continue to elect two anti-slavery senators ? and 
every new southern State two pro-slavery senators ? He says, 
that the increase of free States is remarkable. Is he not aware 
that the augmentation of slave States is equally so ? Does he 
forget that the slaves have multiplied in far greater proportion ? 
Later on I will show him a table, if I can find one, giving the 
proportions. 

Here it is — I find what I want in the American Almanac of 
last year. The table is valuable as a reference ; and it will give 
" Audi " the ratio of increase since the nation's birthday. 



3* 



34 



THE FACTS ; OR, 
SLAVES IN THE SLAVE STATES. 



STATES. 


1790. 


1800. 


1810. 


1820. 


1830. 


1840. 


*1850. 







_ 


_ 


_ 


_ 


— 


— 


New Hampshire, 


158 


8 


— 


— 


— 


1 


— 


Vermont, 


17 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


Massachusetts,... 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


Rhode Island,.. . 


952 


381 


103 


48 


17 


5 


— 




2,759 


951 


310 


97 


25 


17 


— 


New York, 


21,324 


20,343 


15,017 


10,0S8 


75 


4 


— 


New Jersey, 


11,423 


12,422 


10,851 


7,657 


2,254 


674 


t236 


Pennsylvania,... 


3,737 


1,706 


795 


211 


403 


64 


— 


Delaware, 


8,887 


6,153 


4,177 


4,509 


3,292 


2,605 


2,290 


Maryland, 


103,036 


105,635 


111.502 


107,398 


102,294 


89,737 


90,368 




203,427 


345,796 


392,518 


425 153 


469,757 


448,987 


472,528 


North Carolina,.. 


100,572 


133,296 


168,824 


295,017 


235,601 


245,817 


288,548 


South Carolina,.. 


107,094 


146,151 


196,365 


258,475 


315,401 


327,038 


384,984 




29,264 


59,404 


105,218 


149,656 


15 501 
217,531 


25,717 
280,944 


39,310 


Georgia, 




— 


— 


— 


41,879 


117,549 


253,532 


342,S44 


Mississippi, 


— 


3,489 


17,0S8 


32,814 


05,659 


195,211 




Louisiana, 


— 


— 


34,660 


69,064 


109,588 


168,452 


244,809 




— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


58,161 







— 


— 


1,617 


4,576 


19,935 


47, mo 


Tennessee, 


3,417 


13,5S4 


44,535 


80,107 


141.603 


188,059 


239,459 


Kentucky, 


11,830 


40,343 


80,561 


126.732 


165,213 


1S2.258 


210,981 


Ohio, 








24 


— 


32 


3 


— 


Michigan, 




- 


135 


23T 

168 

3,011 


190 

117 

10,222 


747 

25,081 


3 
331 

58,240 


87,422 




Missouri, 


Wisconsin, 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


11 


— 




— 










_ 


16 


_ 


California, 


Dist. of Columbia, 


— 


3;244 


5,395 


6,377 


6,119 


4,694 


3,687 


607,S97 


893,041 


1,191,359 


1,627,428 


1,998,318 


2,487,355 


3,204,2S7 



* No slaves are returned in the Territories of New Mexico and Oregon ; in Utah, 26 
are returned. 
t Apprentices by the State Act to abolish Slavery, of April 18, 1846. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 35 

Taking the increase in the slave population from 1850 to 
1860, in the same ratio as from 1840 to 1850, it will be 28-j-f 
per cent., making an increase for ten years of 923,342, showing 
the total number of slaves in the United States, in 1860, to 
be 4,121,555. Does "Audi" not observe by this the same 
increase in slavery ? 



Murray was a full-blooded Anti-American Englishman ; he 
went to America ; he examined the question ; he came home 
disgusted with the misplaced philanthropy of the Beecher 
Stowe party. I met him in London society, and he admitted 
that Englishmen did not understand America or her institu- 
tions. 

In his interesting and clever work, " The Slave and the Free," 
he shows up some of the inconsistencies of the Ebony Party. 
No wonder the slave-owners tighten the bonds. He says : 

First. The national spirit of man rebels against wholesale vituperation 
and calumny. 

Secondly. The obstacles (still speaking of the abolitionists), they have 
placed in the way of giving the slave simple education, by introducing 
most inflammatory pamphlets. 

Thirdly. The questionable sincerity of their professed sympathies for 
the slave, evidenced by the antipathy they exhibit toward the free 
negroes, and by the palpable fact, that he is far worse oif in a free than a 
slave State. 

For " Audi's " benefit I quote from page 389, by the same 
author : 

" I unhesitatingly declare that the emancipation of the negro through- 
out the southern States, if it took place to-morrow, would be the greatest 
curse the white man could inflict upon them !" 

The evidence examined before the Committee of the House of 
Commons says, some abolitionists examined declared they feared 
the negroes when free would be a nuisance to the State. 



36 the facts; or, 

"Slavery has its evils, but," write Michaelis and Grotius, " It 
has also its advantages." 

The negro is a man in body, but an infant in mind. You are 
about arming, said Mr. Canning, the intellect of a child with the 
limbs of a giant. Emancipation must be gradual, not imme- 
diate. It is a question of circumstances, time, place, and 
men. 

Homer said a freeman lost half his value by becoming a slave. 
In our day it is just the reverse. The Romans enslaved their 
own blood — hence Homer's comment ; but in America there are 
two races — hence my comment. 

Will not the abolitionists admit that the Christian slave is a 
peg higher than the African savage ! Do they not consider a 
Virginian negro better taken care of, better in body, better in 
mind, than an English pauper ? Have they forgotten that, 
notwithstanding the millions shipped to America, England has 
to-day one-fourth as many paupers on the registrar's record as 
America has slaves? Ship-load after ship-load have been 
poured in upon us without apparently lessening their number. 
I remember chartering the ship "President," and sending her to 
New York with a cargo of the Marquis of Lansdowne's paupers, 
and I also remember the thousands it cost the firm for bonding 
them there, and in paying the State for their support. Bad 
as is American slavery it has none of the atrocities of the serf- 
dom of the India ! Englishmen initiated American slavery in a 
carriage and four, while the Indian slavery was a barefooted 
action, over sharp stones. The Parliamentary Committee told 
of atrocities in India that curdled the blood, they were so bru- 
tal ! I allude to the Commons' Committee to inquire if it was 
true that natives of India were tortured to make them disgorge 
the revenue. It is useless for me to introduce the evidence here ; 
but the curious had better refer to Hansard. 

American slavery is fully equal to Indian freedom. Ryots 
work for twopence per day. Slaves sometimes earn four shil- 
lings after they have finished their work. 



AT WHOSE DOOK DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 37 

Englishmen must read up on America. The moment they 
give fair play to reflection, they will reject the one-masted, one- 
eyed, one-horse abolition hobby. I wish it were possible for 
every New York packet to bring over five or six-hundred negroes 
to Liverpool, for the next six months ; it would not only improve 
freights, but would give the Anti-slavery people on this side a 
specimen of their " African free-and-equal " brethren. 

Some 50,000 American negroes, scattered judiciously over the 
kingdom — some surrounding the Duchess of Sutherland's car- 
riage — some waiting Lord Brougham's exit from the Lords — 
others in the wake of Lord Palmerston, going to the Commons 
— a lot of them on the flags of the Exchange, among the cot- 
ton brokers — another batch in Hyde Park, and some in Trafal- 
gar Square — I should enjoy it much, because then the abolitionists 
would understand the question, besides having a taste of the 
negro's Eau de Cologne quality ! 

Cannot this be arranged ? If slaves are too hteh for the 
experiment, try free negroes. They are plenty enough and 
cheap enough. 

Observe what De Tocqueville writes — speaking of the free 
negro of the North. 

" Yes, he is free ; but he can have neither the rights, nor the 
pleasures, nor the labor, nor the affections, nor the altar, nor 
the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be. 

" He meets the white man upon fair terms, neither in life nor 
in death." 

And yet the Wilberforcian poet writes : 

" Bondage, is winter — darkness — death — despair, 

" Freedom, the sun, the sea, the mountains, and the air." 

The anti-slavery party mean well, and earnestly desire eman- 
cipation. But it is all talk — all mutual admiration proclama- 
tions. Having sworn so often the horse was eighteen feet high, 
they believe it to be true. The ape's affection for its young is 



38 THE FACTS J OR, 

sometimes seen in hugging it to death. So the anti-slavery 
party pursue their mania to the injury of the slave. There is 
an old proverb that speaks of a certain place being paved with 
good intentions. But music will not cure the tooth-ache. 

The fact is, the curly-haired philanthropists have dwelt so 
long upon the theme ; thought so much upon the cruelties of 
slavery ; imagined so many brutal acts on the part of slave- 
owners that they really are sincere in their belief. The mind 
bent on one thing becomes diseased — it is a natural principle. 
A man was bled to death in Paris all by imagination. An alarm 
clock awakes you the first day, but sleep five minutes the next 
and you cease to hear the alarm ; so it is with the conscience. 
The mind will become glued up — caked. That is now the trou- 
ble with the anti-slavery people ; their mind is caked. " lie 
who hath oue hog, fattens him. He who hath one son makes 
him a fool." So he who hath one hobby, rides it to death ! The 
Exeter Hall disciples forget that all feet do not fit the same 
shoe. That the pleasures of the rich are the tears of the poor. 
They should see the working of the old adage in Jamaica. 
Remove an old tree and it dies. I doubt if abolition keys will 
ever open Paradise to the slave. 

Having replied to Audi's philippic, I resume my argument 
by asserting that the African has done nothing to mark his 
equality with the Anglo-Saxon race ! 

What, nothing ? No arts, no sciences, no manufactories, no 
agricultural improvements, nothing for literature, nothing for 
religion ? No, not anything, and this too, in a continent more 
thickly populated than America, or England, or France ! The 
Asiatic shows works of utility; the European is always inventing; 
the American's energy never ceases ; even the wretched Austra- 
lian transfixes game with a Boomerang — but what has the 
African done ? In Africa, you may say, they have no opportu- 
nity — but no such excuse will apply to America. In our north- 
ern States the census of 1860 will show the free black population 
to be some 500 000 ! Many of these negroes have been educated 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 39 

in northern schools, some in northern colleges. They have mixed 
with the whites, and benefited by their civilization, yet what 
have they accomplished ? 

Sidney Smith's strictures on American books, would apply to 
the Africans — where are their historians, their poets, their ora- 
tors, their artists? What works have they completed that 
should place them on a level with the American or the English- 
man ? 

There may be a few instances, but they are very rare ; and in 
such cases, any energy, or genius, or intellectual vigor generally 
arises from the white blood in their veins. Frederic Douglass is 
a mulatto. 

I know it is a difficult matter to convince against settled con- 
victions. Yet no one ought to judge without reflection. Two 
generations have prejudiced Englishmen against Americans. I 
am in hopes that the rising one will not think so badly of us. If 
the English people will think as well of the Americans as the 
abolitionists do of the Africans I shall be satisfied. 

One can hardly keep his patience in looking over the Parlia- 
mentary debates, and reading the arguments of Lord Palmer- 
ston. Lord Brougham said last week that he had devoted some 
sixty years to the subject, but, notwithstanding his experience, 
he failed to reply to the eloquent speech of Lord Malmesbury, 
where he justified himself in giving up the right of search. 

Lord Clarendon " believed the American Government was fully 
as desirous as they were themselves honestly to put down the 
traffic." Lords Shaftesbury and Oxford cannot much longer 
mislead the English people on this question. 

How often I have listened and read the thrilling scenes por- 
trayed by the anti-slavery statesmen, on the " Horrors of the 
Middle Passage !" How little their audiences reflected — one 
moment's thought would have told them that, if the British 
squadron which costs some £1,000,000 every year — (a sum 
equal to the sum received from duties on education by taxing 
newspapers !) had been removed, the trade would have been 



40 THE FACTS ; OK, 

carried on in emigrant ships of suitable tonnage, properly 
manned and well provided with provisions, instead of the miser- 
able one-deck craft, where the slaves were all covered and smoth- 
ered the moment a cruiser came in sight. 

For half the deaths of late years on the African voyages, and 
two-thirds the misery, you may thank the British squadron on the 
coast, which England found to her cost (like her West Indian 
Emancipation Loan, and the regiments placed there to keep down 
the negroes) has proved not only a grave to her capital, but a 
cemetery to her soldiers and her sailors 1 

Who was it said that two governors were always required at 
Sierra Leone ; one was going out alive while the other was com- 
ing home dead ? America must have eighty guns on the coast 
by the arbitration treaty. Already we have expended $800,000 
a-year for seventeen years, or $13,600,000 1 For what ? To 
keep down the slave trade, and oblige England's slave guardians ! 
The money would have been better invested, if spent in educat- 
ing some of the three millions out of the five millions of children 
in England and AVales, which the returns show receive no educa- 
tion whatever, for certainly she has not stopped the slave trade. 
And so long as money can be made in the inhuman traffic she 
cannot stop it. 

The year of the treaty some 30,000 negroes were exported 
from Africa per annum ; in 1843, 55,000. In 1846, it rose to 
76,000, and in 1841, to 84, COO ! and this in spite of twenty mil- 
lions spent by England and America, since 1842, in trying to 
check it. The taxpayers should inquire into it, and ask the 
anti-slavery lords if it is not about time for them to acknowledge 
the error of their ways and means ? All this time slavery has 
been carried on in all quarters, under a change of name. 

Out of the 28,171 Chinese imported, 4,124 have perished, 
and few of the remainder will ever reach again their native land ! 
The record is chilling, for the mortality is terrible. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LEE? 41 

While Lord Paltnerston has closed the Portuguese and Bra- 
zilian slave markets — ruined the West Indies, and created a 
national feeling of dislike against Americans — the African slave 
trade has flourished, in spite of the Spanish treaty — and poor 
Jamaica has been allowed to perish under Exeter-hall philan- 
thropy, while Cuba and Porto Rico have flourished under the 
guano stimulation of England's purchases of slave-grown sugar — 
a direct premium on slavery. 

Are the abolitionists really in earnest ? If so, why not let 
charity begin at home, why not reduce theory to practice ? 
Why not, like Mrs. Dombey, make an effort. Let me take up 
one or two more of their inconsistencies. 

When a Brittish cruiser, after smothering half the slaves, over- 
takes the slaver on the coast, do you not think it would be a 
good time to take the poor middle-passage creatures, who are 
alive, back to their dear fathers and dear mothers — their dear 
friends in Africa ? Most certainly you do. But are they car- 
ried back, we ask ? No, on the contrary, are they not packed 
off to the West Indies, where they have the honor of serving 
some 28 years as apprentices ! and who pockets the money ? 
Does not the master get forty years instead of twenty-eight out 
of them by over work? Have any ever returned to their 
native land ? None from England ! but America, much-abused 
America, takes a slaver, and selects her finest war-ship to con- 
vey the slaves back to Africa. 

It was only the other day that the Niagara war-frigate landed 
the slaves on board the Echo on the Negro Coast ; and I am 
glad to see the universal cry of shame, both South as well as 
North, at the slip-shod laws of Georgia regarding the slaves on 
board the Wanderer. I think the speculation was political, not 
commercial. But, in either case, it is disgraceful to our coun- 
try. 

These are the men who put on the livery of Southern Rights 
for the selfish purpose of making money. Fellows that would 
make money in any way. 



42 THE FACTS ; OR, 

Cuba is the slave mart. Slaves pay, and Cubans grow rich. 
How is the trade to be stopped ? 

Captain Carnot gives an account of the sales of slaves sold in 
Havana, in 182T : 

Sales and net proceeds of 217 slaves in Cuba $81,000 

Outward disbursements at Havana $21,000 

Homeward disbursements 6,000 

Inward disbursements at Havana including hush money 

to government officers 13,000 

Net profits on the voyage 41,000 — $81,000 



Letters continue to pour in upon me as these papers are in 
course of publication — some congratulatory, some the reverse. 
Some say, what he has said is true ; others, that we knew it all 
before. One man thinks I have no right to compare England 
a centuary ago, with America now — of course not — nor have I 
done so. Another wants to kuow the object of raking up the 
past ? Simply to inform the children of England that negro 
slavery was an imported article; and that England, not America, 
was the importer ! Another asks — Are you, or are you not, 
advocating slavery ? I tell him to wait for the concluding 
article. 

This morning I received the following from one of the leading 
journalists of London :* 

" Stop your letters on slavery ! They are out of place in 
England. Take my advice ; it is as unwise to defend slavery in 
England, as it would be to attack Mahomet in Arabia, or 
Buddha in Thibet. Besides, what good can you do ? I am 
right in this matter, depend on it — so hold your hand." I am 
not defending slavery, but America against the odium England 
showers upon her, on account of that curse which she introduced 
into our country. 



Charles Mackay, Esq., LL.D., editor of the "Illustrated London News." 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 43 

Probably thirty thousand African slaves run the gauntlet of 
the British cruisers last year and landed in Cuba ! And of the 
seventy-one cargoes of Chinese slaves, nearly twenty-nine were 
under the flag of England — that flag which has sheltered slave 
ships off and on — "for a thousand years, the battle, etc." 
Campbell was an abolitionist ! 

The Cubans are wide awake. The Spanish Governor-Gene- 
rals get as rich in a few years as the British army and navy con- 
tractors ! Slaves from Africa, slaves from China, and slaves 
from Yucatan ! Yes ! Colvin, the American Consul at Deme- 
rara, says, "'that Cuba stole last year, 1,500 free Indians from 
Yucatan, and is now working them in slavery !" 

Oh, these Cubans ! They are almost as bad as the English 
merchants were a half a century ago. Why does not England 
enforce the Spanish treaty first and stick pins in America after- 
ward ? 

Mauritius is a 100,000 hhds. of-sugar-per-annum colony. She 
is England's pet producer. No wonder she prospers. At the 
commencement of last year she had 142,000 slaves. I beg Lord 
Brougham's pardon — 142,000 coolies ! 

The Friend of China, commenting on the action brought re 
British ship, " John Calvin," at Hong-Kong, in March, 1856, 
as k s — "Were they really Englishmen who told the poor Coolies 
that they should embark against their will ? — that said, ' You 
have taken an advance, and go you shall V Did Englishmen say 
to the kind-hearted magistrate, ' We will give them no investiga- 
tion ; we have them, and we will keep them. Say naught to 
us of the children's indentures ; we have them — their flesh, their 
faculties, their liberties — all are ours — and go they shall — away 
with them V " 

"Yes," says the " Friend of China," "they were English- 
men !" Mr. Day says the Coolies were submissive, " even when 
borne down by fever, and dysentery, and dropsy — they were 
submissive — most submissive !" 

Captain Thornhill adds ; " The way I kept them submissive, 



44 



THE FACTS : OR, 



was by stationing men at each hatchway, with muskets loaded, 
and bayonets fixed." 

This is only one picture. A few months before, I saw 
the slave-pens at Macao — the revolting examination of the slaves 
at Swatow — and shuddered when the captains of the /ree-slave 
ships told me of the number that had jumped overboard that 
morning, when they learned that they had been betrayed ! The 
swollen corpses on board the " Waverley n at Manilla, some two 
hundred and fifty human beings, when the captain took off the 
hatches, reminded me of a scene I once saw in Trafalgar dock, 
of a lot of cattle taken out of an Irish steamer that had 
weathered the gale, although the bullocks were smothered. The 
sight was sickening. 

The extent of this disguised slave traffic with Cuba may be 
seen by glancing at these government returns. 



Years. 


°*3 

6 CO 


* . 

£ a 
tt a 

fcJD© 


13 

IS -^ 
O S 

w 


.11 

— si 


6 


Per cent, of 
Mortality. 


1847 

1853... 


2 
15 
4 
6 
15 
28 
33 
13 


979 
8,349 
2,375 
6,544 
10,467 
18,310 
32,809 
lu,2S3 


612 
5,150 
1,750 
3,130 

6,152 
10,116 
16,414 

6,799 


571 
4,307 
1,711 
2,985 
4,96S 
8.547 
13,385 
6,027 


41 

843 

89 

145 

1,184 

1,569 

3,029 

772 


6.70 
16.37 
2.23 
4«3i 
19.24* 
15 51 
IS. 45 
11.35* 


1654 

1855 


1856 

1858 

1858 

1859 

Total, 


116 


90,216 


50,123 


42,501 


7,622 


15.20 Av. 



The Spanish ship, Ogneredo, and British ship, Duke of 
Argyle (the Duke is an abolition leader) brought the first two 
cargoes in June, 1847 — forty-one died — only 571 were landed ; 
seven thousand died out of the fifty thousand imported. A 
mortality of fourteen per cent.! 

The shipments of coolies have occupied one hundred aud six- 
teen vessels, under the several national flags as follows : — Thirty- 
seven British ; seventeen United States of' America ; fifteen 
Spanish ; fifteen French ; fifteen Dutch ; six Peruvian ; three 



AT WHOSE DOOK DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 45 

Portuguese ; three Bremen ; two Norway ; two Chile, and one 
Danish. 

Dr. Arnold says that the old system of English slavery was 
far kinder than that now existing of hired servants. We might 
apply the remark more pointedly to the Coolie trade. 

For a thousand pounds of law we do not get an ounce of love. 
So the English abolitionists give the Americans a bushel of 
advice without a pint of consistency. 

Love asks faith — faith requires firmness, but firmness must be 
consistent. 

America is not the worst place in the world. 

There are dark streams of sorrow even in happy England, 
where so large a portion of the working classes cannot write 
their names. Gray was not speaking of American slaves, but 
English laborers, when he wrote : 

" But knowledge to their eyes her ample page, 
Kich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll ; 
Dull penury repressed their noble rage, 
And froze the genial current of the soul." 

Lord Morpeth told the young men of Leeds a few weeks since : 

" Every information that had lately been received from the U.S., tended 
to show that a crisis was approaching. The leaven was fermenting, effer- 
vescing fast and hot ; the struggle was becoming more fierce, more intense, 
more pervading. Had not some of them lately read instances of treat- 
ment of slaves, which transcended even the usual depth and blackness of 
horror?" * 

" In the rice swamp, the sugar plantation, and the slave mart, 
where the slave still toiled and bled, and was sold afresh." 

What will the noble Earl have, emancipation ? Does he wish 
another St. Domingo massacre ? Does he not believe that if the 
slaves were left to themselves, the southern plantations would 
become a wilderness ? Can the negro grow cotton, and sugar, 
and rice, and tobacco without a master-mind to guide him ? 
Perhaps the Earl of Carlisle would suggest some way to raise a 



46 



THE FACTS ; OR, 



fund, so that his seed-cucumber theory can be reduced to practi- 
cal use ? 

Look at the money expended on that absurd colonization 
scheme of Liberia. 



COST OF COLONIZATION. 



The following table, prepared for the " African Repository," 
will show the annual receipts of the American Colonization 
Society from its organization to the present : 



Tears. Receipts. 

1841 $42,443 68 

1812 32,898 88 

1843 36,093 04 

18 14 33,640 39 

1845 56,458 GO 

1846 89,900 03 

1847 29,472 84 

1848 49,845 91 

1849 60,332 S4 

1850 64,973 91 

1851 97,443 77 

1852 78,1)10 27 

1853 82,458 25 

1854 65,433 93 

1855 55.276 S9 

1856 81,384 41 

1857 97,384 84 

1858 ....61,820 19 

$1,532,849 38 



The Maryland State Colonization Society has received 

since its organization, $309,759 33 

The N. Y. State and Pa. Society, during their inde- 
pendent condition prior to 1840, received 95,640 00 

The Mississippi State Colonization Society, ditto, 12,000 00 

Making a total, to the beginning of this year, of $1,950,238 71 



Years. 

1817-9 

1820-2 


Receipts. 

§14,031 50 

5,027 66 


1823 


4,758 22 


1824 


.. . .• • -4,379 S9 


1S25 


10,125 85 


1826 


14,77'.' -'4 


1827 


13,294 94 


1828 


13,458 17 


1829 


20,295 Gl 


1830 


26,683 41 


1831. . 


32,101 58 


1832 


43,065 08 


1833 


37,242 46 


1834 


22,984 30 


1835 


36,661 49 


1836 


33,096 88 


1837 


25,558 14 


1838 


10,947 41 


1839 


51,498 36 


1840 


56,985 62 



All this expense, and for what good ? The world laughed at 
a Eepublic of civilized Freuchmen, yet the Colonization Society 
considered that negroes were equal to it ! 

Change the form of the negro's head, put in more cubic 
inches of brain, bring him to America, and then expect improve- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 47 

ment; take away the white blood in Liberia, and like Herodotus's 
great negro colony of Colchis, or the historical colony of Masroe, 
it would fade away. 

As it is, the white men have died off like cattle with the mur- 
rain in their unfortunate settlement of Sierra Leone. 

Out of one hundred whites, forty have recently died of the 
yellow fever, among them six Roman Catholic clergymen. 
Bishop Bonwer of the Episcopal church is dead ! All on board 
the schooner Bronte, died. 

Look at the African Mission record. Out of one hundred and 
seventeen white missionaries to northern Africa sent out by the 
English Weslyan Missionary Society, fifty-four died in the field 
— thirteen in three months, twenty-three in six months, and 
thirty-nine within one year of arrival. 

The same mortality followed the exploring parties. 

Mungo Park fell at the head of his band of thirty-eight — all 
perished. The Liverpool Company of 1832-3 lost forty out of 
forty-nine whites. The expedition of 1842 out of one hundred 
and forty-five, lost forty-two 1 Nearly all the blacks lived, 
while the climate was fatal to the whites. 

Perhaps the noble Earl would (after raising the fund, a sim- 
ple matter of one-half the national debt of Great Britain), like to 
send them to Liberia ? 

Eight thousand ships would be required, each to accommodate 
five hundred negroes ! Suppose you put it to vote, how many 
slaves would leave a garden like America to go to a desert like 
Africa ? 

Suppose to-day all the bonds of American society were 
broken, who would reconstruct it ? Who would naturally be 
master, the white man or the black man ? So long as the 
Anglo-Saxon has more brains in his right hand than the African 
has in his head, the white man most assuredly will rise again to 
the top. Where two races dwell on the same soil, one must 
rule. 

Bancroft writing of the slaves when brought to America, says 



48 



THE FACTS J OR, 



that they had " no common language, no abiding usages, no 
worship, no nationality." They were savages, dependent upon 
the white race for civilization. 

Turn the tables, as most of them are born in America, would 
they not be equally ignorant of language, and be cast on a 
shore among their countrymen, who would sell them off again 
to the highest bidder ? As the herd pounce upon the wounded 
deer, so negroes rejoice in the misery of their class. No ; the 
noble Earl should admit that the slaves are happier as they are, 
till some practical plan is discovered for their emancipation. 

The Africans have been, and must continue, servants. 
Nature's laws are indestructible. The Creator first made the 
inanimate world — then the vegetable kingdom — then the ser- 
pent tribe— out of them came the fish, then the fowls of the 
air, then the brute creation ; but His master-piece was man ! 
He divided the world into climates, and peopled it with his 
children. I believe, with Agassiz, that the world was peopled by 
nations, not in pairs. As there were degrees in vegetable, ani- 
mal, and mineral kingdoms, so he instituted degrees in the 
human race. The Caucasian was first, the Mongolian, the 
Malayan, and the American followed ; then he made the African, 
finishing off with the lowest type of man — the Australian ; then 
the baboon, the ape, the monkey, and so on through all the 
varieties of nature. I should have reversed this classification — 
improvement went upward from the monkey to the Cauca- 
sian. 

Africans cannot be changed but by mixing with the whites. 
When they begin to change color, they begin to show that 
change by self-reliance. It was observed that the blacks in the 
Boston schools to the age of fourteen advanced in about the 
same ratio as the whites — but then, says Lyell, the improvement 
stopped. 

Negroes contract the vices, but do not profit by the virtues of 
the white man. Man by nature is indolent, and the African 
likes nothing so well as to sleep like a dog in the sun. 



AT WHOSE DOOK DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 49 

" A black man is a jewel in a woman's eye," is an English 
proverb. 

It is not so in America. 

The black stewards of the American packets stand at fifty 
premium in England, but are seventy-five discount in America. 
Why is this ? most likely a question of supply and demand. 

Were the English at all accustomed to seeing blacks prome- 
nading Regent-street, as we often see them on Broadway, their 
views might change. 

You should see the sable Dianas, and charcoal Yenuses, crino- 
lined, silked, and satined, to an extent that nauseates you, pass- 
ing the New York Hotel, on a Sunday afternoon ! What is more 
disgusting than a negro fop ? or a negress coquette ? aping all 
the absurdities, without adopting any of the dignities of the 
Saxon race. 

England sees slavery three thousand miles off, through dark 
glasses ; she knows nothing of its realities. No works from the 
anti-slavery party speak of kindness from master to slave — no 
books written about their Christmas presents — their new year's 
gifts — their wedding parties — their funeral ceremonies — not a 
word about attentions when ill — no picture of their merry-mak- 
ings — no description of their attachment for their masters — no 
bright side to the negro's existence— all, all is darkness and 
despair ! 



I met an English gentleman yesterday, who some years ago 
saw several slavers taken into St. Helena by the British cruisers. 
At night he was attracted by loud shouts of laughter, the sound 
of music, the clapping of hands, and all the demonstrations of 
gladness. Imagine his surprise when going to the place to find 
that the gaieties proceeded from the captured slaves ! There 
were eighteen hundred in the cave, and such barbarian antics — 
such savage joy — such chattering of tongues — spoke of anything 
but misery. 

3 



50 THE FACTS ; OR, 

Without intellect, without industry, without civilization— how 
can such creatures exist without some stronger mind to guide 
them? 

Where do these slaves go, when taken ? Will some honor- 
able member explain ? They never go hack to Africa ! What are 
the negro's talents ? I answer — music, mimicry, and sleeping in 
the sun. 

I wish an Exeter-hall delegate could be introduced into a 
negro dancing-hall, after an animated Virginia reel ! The 
Thames last year was nothing in comparison ! The leopard 
will not change his skin, nor the negro his odor. 

The underground railway stock has fallen. The Canadians are 
suggesting how to shut out the negroes. No wonder — when their 
poorhouses — their hospitals, and their prisons are so extensively 
patronized by the Free Blacks 1 

There are now some forty thousand of these poor creatures in 
Canada, disgusted with freedom in a cold climate — 40,000 at 
$1,000 each is forty millions of dollars of property belonging 
to southern planters. 

England would go to war with any nation for half that sum ! 

I have been in Canada — I have seen some of these runaways. 
I have also been on the southern plantation, and I consider the 
negro is better clothed and more contented in the warm South 
under slavery, than in the cold North under freedom. Do you 
not believe it ? go with me to that paradise of Canada, so far as 
soil is concerned, Essex and Kent counties, where the negro 
lives — go with me to the townships of Walden, Colchester and 
Gosfield, where runaway slaves most do congregate — and what 
do you see ? Comfort ? no — improvement in the Negro race ? 
no — the Quakers purchased the land for the society in Walden, 
believing that the negroes' prosperity would be advanced — the 
result has made them heart-sick — no wonder. How strange it 
is that Quakerism and Abolitionism should be dying out 
together ! 

Look into the township of Buxton — -you have there a thou- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 51 

sand runaways — deteriorating under the fostering care of the 
" Elgin Association." 

Buxton would hardly be proud of his namesake were he to 
see the squalor of the settlement. Lord Elgin would be disgusted 
to see what use they have made of his name. Broken windows, 
old hats, dirty cottages, filthy streets — half-clad, half-starved 
men, and greasy, waddling women would meet their astonished 
gaze, instead of a trim, happy colony. 

The " Elgin Association " was formed at Toronto — five thou- 
sand shares at ten pounds each, gave them nine thousand acres 
of land. Ryley, a Missouri slave, was one of the pioneers — Mr. 
King was the founder. He liberated his fifteen slaves and lives 
in the desolate spot. With him charity began at home. The 
Canadians were, however, as indignant at the formation of the 
colony as the Ohio citizens were at the liberation of John Ran- 
dolph's negroes. 

The caste among the southern negroes is as marked as in India. 
From coal black to light brown, some fifteen shades — I do not 
remember their names ; but it is no unusual thing to hear a 
negro call another a " white nigger ;" a "poor man's nigger ;" 
a " fifty-dollar nigger." A slave despises nothing more than a poor 
white man or a free negro ! The slaves look down upon the Irish 
and German laborer with supreme contempt. Many of them adopt 
the names of their master's family ; and the slaves of the wealthy 
sneer and disdain to associate with the slaves of the poorer 
planters. There is an aristocracy, an upper-ten-dom in the pecu- 
liar institution ! 

The masters often give them the chance to purchase their 
freedom, and it is most amusing to hear them depreciate them- 
selves. If their master values them at a thousand dollars, they 
insist upon their being only worth half that. 

Were you to offer the slaves freedom to-day, seven-eighths, if 
left to their own choice, would, never leave their masters. 

What do they know of the White Cravat sentiment ? Slaves 



52 THE FACTS ; OK, 

have sense enough to see that the free negroes are not so well 
provided for as themselves. Why should they change comfort 
for want ! 

Depend upon it, the curse of slavery is on the master, not the 
servant. 

Look at the impoverished estates of Virginia, and observe 
how the hand of industry is withered by the enervating laziness 
of the negro. 

How many planters there are who would like to rid them- 
selves of the system ; but how ? There's the rub. 

Who will pay them ? and where are the slaves to go when 
free ? To the North ? No. The North would soon pass pro- 
hibitory laws. Ohio is nauseated with them already ; they hang 
round the cities — loaf about the streets — but never show self- 
reliance. Where do you find the half-million free negroes of 
the North ? and what are their occupations ? Are they not ser- 
vants, waiters, barbers, cooks, most of which are employed by 
white men ? The negro is without self-reliance. 

I spoke of Buxton and the Elgin association — But take other 
negro colonies — the Dresden Settlement in Dana Township. 
The original purchase was to have been 20,000 acres, and the 
colony named " Wilberforce :" but the plan fell through. One 
fourth of the population of Chatham are negroes. Five miles 
from there you find the Moore Colored School. Then there is 
the Round settlement, as it is called, and New Canaan Bap- 
tist Creek. In Windsor, in Essex Co., you have the Refuge 
Home Society, established in 1852 — a two-thousand acre lot — 
and intelligent Canadians assure me that nearly all the schemes 
are failures. Sheep-stealing and rape is more frequent than 
virtuous deeds — the slave arrives a beggar — robs and goes to 
jail — after that, he is ready for anything. 

There are thousands of acres of land, that can be bought for 
a song in the West. Do you ever hear of negroes opening up any 
new country ? — combining for any worthy object ? having any 
scheme for improving themselves ? 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 53 

Three millions of white men defeated the finest armies, over- 
came the first generals, and threw off the yoke of the first 
power of the world, not a century ago ! To-day there are four 
millions of slaves in the United States — possessed they the capa- 
city, the courage, the genius of the Saxon race, would they not 
rise as one man for liberty or perish in the struggle ? 



[Professor Allen is not a negro. I have been much enter- 
tained by his lectures at the Hope Hall. He is clever, and has 
the good sense not to spice his discourse with abuse of America. 
He never was a slave, and he deserves commendation for work- 
ing his way to a Professor's chair in an America College. I like 
talent, no matter what the color — our white blood in his veins 
is his passport to success. He quartered the caste — First Sambo; 
second, Mulatto; third, Quadroon; fourth, Whitem&n — and 
some from all these classes are slave-owners. He spoke of one 
wealthy Sambo who owned a large plantation. Amalgamation 
will abolish slavery, but you cannot make a white man in a day. 
The chairman, last evening, at the close of the lecture, in com- 
menting upon "Young America's" articles on slavery, after in* 
stancing Mr. Allen's severe handling and narrow escape from the 
Philistines of western New York, because he married a white 
lady, as compared with the freedom with which the Aboli- 
tionists could be attacked in England, and slavery advocated at 
their very doors— asked " Young America " if he did not think 
free discussion on this side had a wider range than liberty on 
that ? No ! First — I have not advocated slavery, but simply 
took the field against the favorite as a matter of debate. The 
abolitionists have had it all their own way for a quarter of a 
century ; and it amuses me, and cannot harm them, to put on 
the gloves, in order to try their mettle. Second, the treatment 
which the Professor received has been occasioned by the con- 
tinual interference of the Anti-slavery party. Wheu robbers 
are in the house, it is natural to hide the spoons. When tho 



54 THE FACTS ; OR, 

French press talk too plainly, Napoleon puts on the screw. 
When disease is on board, the ship is quarantined. So, when 
Abolitionists carried the sentiment of Emancipation to the 
point — 

" Slaves, rise, and slay your masters !" 

schools were closed, churches were watched, incendiary tracts 
were prohibited, and self-preservation occasioned that caution 
which was portrayed last night. For all the Professor's afflic- 
tions I blame the party represented by Mr. Jeffery and Mr. 
Steinthal. Should the in-coming Cunard steamer bring advices 
that some wealthy planter had willed these gentlemen a thou- 
sand slaves, I should like, as a matter of curiosity, to see what 
course they would pursue with the valuable bequest 1] 



Benezet, the Pennsylvanian Quaker, considered the negro 
slave fully equal to the white man. Dr. Foure the clever French 
physician, made the same statement from his experience at Hayti. 
Sir John Herschel asserted that the Hottentot slaves of the 
Cape of Good Hope were equal in every respect to English- 
men I 

It is surprising that such distinguished authority can be found 
to testify so directly in the face of nature, of history, of facts. 

The Roman novelist Petronius, living under Nero, describes 
three vagabond literary men on board a ship in the Levant — two 
of whom discovered that they had robbed the owner, a mer- 
chant on board. Dreading revenge, one of them says : 

" Eumolpus, being a scholar, has certainly ink with him ; 
let us, therefore, dye ourselves from top to toe, and as Ethopian 
slaves we shall be at his command without fear of torture ; for 
by the change of color we shall deceive our mariner." 

But Geiton exclaims in reply, " As if color alone could trans- 
form our shape ! for many things have to conspire that the lie 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 55 

might be maintained under any circumstances. Or can we fill 
our lips with an ugly swelling ? can we crisp our hair with an 
iron ? and mark our forehead with scars ? and distort our 
shanks into a curve ? and draw our heels down to the earth ? 
and change our beard into a foreign fashion ? Artificial color 
besmears the body, but does not change it." 

The negro appears to have the same peculiarity in our time. 
This state of feeling was only brought about by a few earnest 
me n — clever writers, clever speakers — backed up by Quaker 
energy, Quaker perseverance, and Quaker money. All the 
tricks of bar-room politicians were resorted to. Whips were 
found in sugar hogsheads, manacles, handcuffs, chains were 
brought out. Engravings still hang upon the walls of dowager 
abolitionists, showing "Uncle Tom" in his mutilated condition. 
These pictures were hung up alongside of Raphaels, Murillos, 
and Rubens. Such books as Hildreth's " White Slave " were 
distributed, with coarse cuts of slave-drivers' cruelties. 

The African Institution was founded in 1801. Of the sixty- 
two noblemen and gentry forming the first committee, only three 
survive, — Lords Brougham, Lushington, and Lansdowne — three 
of the most distinguished of living statesmen. 

Wilberforce, that year, tried in vain to make the negroes 
grow cotton in Africa ; of course he failed. In 1833 he made 
another attempt : of course he failed again. The negro must 
have a master. 

Had the British philanthropists shown the same enterprise in 
endeavoring to raise African cotton, as their brothers and 
friends, the British shipowners, were exercising in catching slaves 
and dispatching them to the West Indies, they might have been 
as successful in the one case as the other. Clegg of Manchester, 
after trying for fifty years, with deserving perseverance, has 
accomplished the importation of one small shipload ! Rather dis- 
couraging, after the labor of half a century, to get but 146,047 
pounds of cotton. The Manchester people, as usual, got up the 
mutual admiration reception to Dr. Livingstone ; and the Doc- 



56 THE FACTS ; OK, 

tor gets a good round sum of money, and deserves every praise 
for his industry, his courage, and his energy ; but his expedi- 
tion in search of cotton among the negroes is as absurd as to 
fit out expeditions for Sir John Franklin. I read nothing in 
Livingstone's or Bath's explorations to convey different conclu- 
sions than derived from following in the path of Mungo Park or 
Clapperton. The negroes are an inferior race, and it is simply 
absurd to place them on a level with the white man. 

" The first white man," says Voltaire, " who beheld a negro 
must have been greatly astonished ; but the reasoner who claims 
that the negro comes from the white man astonishes me a great 
deal more." 

Roberts, McGill, Lewis, Benedict, Teague, Benson, of Liberia 
notoriety, may have shown their heads above the common herd 
of their countrymen, but we must wait for the rising generation 
before we give them credit for benefiting their race in African 
colonization. 

From Sennaar, in the east, to Senegal, in the west — Ashan- 
tees, the Kroomen, or the Mozambiques — from the Congo to the 
Niger — from the Hottentot to the Nubian — I have seen nothing 
in my roaming — read of nothing in my reading — heard of 
nothing in talking of the African, to lead me to indorse any of 
the wild statements of Exeter Hall, that the negro is the equal 
of the Saxon race. 

The African negro race was ruled by the Foolah race — as 
mulattoes govern in Liberia. 'Twas the same in Hayti — the 
mulattoes governed till the blacks murdered them. 

Jefferson, the author of the Free and Equal clause, says, in 
" Notes on Virginia," " Never yet could I find that a black had 
uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never saw 
even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture." 

The essay of James Grahame, Esq. — the letters of Sir George 
Stephen — the works of Clarkson, Buxton, O'Connell, Gurney, 
and all the Wilberforcians in a body, to the contrary notwith- 
standing. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 57 

. What a strange falling off in sentiment to allow a quarter of 
a century to elapse between the abolition of the slave-trade and 
the emancipation of the slaves ! 

The instructions to the Exeter Hall lecturers have the Spur- 
geon smack to them. Public opinion was acted upon by all 
kinds of exaggerations. Stephen and Buxton both admit to 
issuing proclamations and sticking them over the bills of the 
pro-slavery party in the night-time. A bill-poster, if caught at 
it in our day, would be given in charge. 

All this while slaves were being packed in the Barracoons — 
transported over the " middle passage " — landed in Cuba under 
the British guns — and from Cuba found their way into Jamaica 
and the other islands. 

That was the case at that time, and is now. 

Twenty years ago Don Pedro Blanco was the Rothschild of 
slavery at Gallinas. His bills in payment for English consign- 
ments, on England, France, or the United States, were as good 
as gold in Sierra Leone and Monrovia ! 

There is many a man living in London who will remember the 
excitement occasioned in 1809, when the Commercio de Rio was 
seized at Gravesend, just as her fittings had been completed for 
eight hundred slaves ! 

Examine the manifests of the African vessels that are now 
fitting out in British ports. Look closely at the details ; and 
prove, if you can, that much of the cargo is not for the pur- 
chasing of slaves. If not, where do the Spaniards get supplies 
for the five hundred slaves that are dispatched every week from the 
African Barracoons for Cuba and Porto Rico ? Who can dis- 
pute but that five thousand negroes are on the ocean this very 
day, kidnapped in Africa, for the slave markets of the Spanish 
colonies ? And that Birmingham makes the articles for that 
market. 

Canning's resolutions of 1823 were ineffectual. These instruc- 
tions went out to every slave colony, but were of course disre- 
garded : 

3* 



58 THE FACTS J OE, 

" Religious instruction was to be provided ; Sunday markets were to be 
abolished ; slave evidence was to be admissible ; slave marriages were to 
be legalized ; slave property was to be protected ; manumission was to be 
facilitated ; families not to be separated by will, nor slaves from the 
estates to which they belonged ; arbitrary punishment, and the corporal 
punishment of females were to be abolished ; the driving whip was to be 
abandoned ; and savings' banks were to be established." 

These regulations could not be forced, any more than British 
cruisers could arrest the slave traffic. 

The English — the Irish — the Scotch — the French slave-owners 
in America, have the reputation of being the worst taskmasters. 
Because the standard of labor they are accustomed to is greater 
than what the planter expects from the negro. The reports 
speok of British cruelty in the Mauritius that well may occa- 
sion horror : 

" Slaves were murdered piecemeal, roasted alive in ovens ; flogged, 
starved, dismembered, tortured, and slaughtered. Suicide and infanticide 
were the daily recourse of parents ; mothers killed their children from 
humanity, and killed themselves from despair. And the decrease in the 
slave population was supplied by daily importations from Madagascar and 
the Seychelles, unchecked by our cruisers, and unheeded by the local 
authorities." 

And all this only thirty years ago ! This was in the Mauritius 
— not "civilized America !" But from these facts the abolition- 
ists judged of American slavery. 

The slave population of that island was 60,000 when 
Brougham passed his bill in 1811 ; yet in 1829 all of " this vast 
number," Buxton ascertained, " had been exterminated, and been 
replaced more than once !" 

Think of a lady destroying the sight of her slave by thrusting 
red hot knitting-needles into her eyes ! while her neighbor 
roasted her slave to death in an oven ! This was British, not 
American cruelty ! 

This was English slavery j and no wonder Buxton suppressed 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 59 

the facts so long. Such things could not occur in America ! 
Yet Americans have been judged unheard — unseen — and this is 
an Englishman's idea of fair play ! 

How few are aware that in this enlightened age, even in 
Cumberland, men and women sell themselves as slaves for so 
much per annum. I mean as servants. 

Did not William Thompson, the Scotch weaver, who travelled 
on foot through the slave States, state, in his description of 
negro slavery, that the separation of families did not take place 
to such an extent as with the laboring poor of Scotland ? 

The Americans are acknowledged to be the kindest slave- 
masters in the world. The Northerners are more severe than 
the Southerners. Why ? Because they have been accustomed 
to see a white man do a day's work. Indolence makes them 
impatient, and it requires time to make them familiar with the 
dilatory habits of the negro. An able-bodied American for 
hard labor is worth half-a-dozen Africans. 

Gibbon says that arithmetic is the natural enemy of rhetoric. 
For every one slave imported into America — such is the cherish- 
ing care of the master — ten have been produced ; while for 
every three transported into the West Indies only one now exists ! 



The good-natured lecture which " Non-Prejudice " delivered to 
" Young America," in the Northern Times, of Monday, deserves 
a passing notice. Agreeing with me in so many things— admit- 
ting the strength of my facts on slavery, if not accepting all 
my opinions— he falls back upon the time-worn argument of the 
equality of all men. That equality I deny. There is no 
equality in mankind. As one brain is larger than another brain, 
so one race will command and govern another race. Let me 
quote a paragraph from this letter : 

" * Young America ' says, ' the Africans have been, and always must be, 
servants ; nature's laws are indestructible.' Certainly nature's laws aro 



60 THE FACTS ; OB, 

indestructible ; but a dogmatic statement like that does not prove that it 
is one of nature's laws that Africans must always continue servants. Our 
natural sense of justice, and the constitution of the United States, tell us 
that it is one of nature's indestructible laics that all men are born free 
and equal. And ' Young America ' knows very well that if he, instead 
of having been born a smart, go-ahead Yankee, had come into the world 
a miserable, helpless fellow, with no self-reliance, fit only to do what he 
was told, that he would not have considered that a sufficient justification 
to his neighbor for taking him and making him his slave, even though 
his neighbor might assert 'that he required some stronger mind to guide 
him,' and it was entirely for his good." 

Let " Non-Prejudice " change the word slave to servant and it 
will sound less harshly. 

Servitude like happiness is only comparative, — good is com- 
parative, — so is evil, — so is light, heat, air, — all are comparative. 
Liberty when mistaken for license — servility when mistaken for 
civility, is as bad as to place the servant in the master's chair. 
The Creator made the world to suit himself, — not Exeter Hall. 
His tenants were of his own choosing. Having a taste for 
colors, as shown in the rainbow, the dolphin, the flower-garden, 
and the forest, he carried out his fancy in the color, shape, and 
capacity of man. In nature, large fish swallow little fish, — 
large trees draw the sap from little trees, — large oceans drink 
up the rivulets — so that race that possesses most governing 
power, rules. The negro never was governor. American slaves 
sing psalms, quote Scripture, and have fewer crimes than any 
other race, — but mark the contrast in Africa ! "What have 
missionaries accomplished there ? The example and constant 
intercourse with the white man has improved the negro's life in 
America, but no such result has followed Dr. Livingstone. 

A black hen may lay a white egg, and a black plum may be 
as sweet as a white one, but no such analogy applies to the 
African. A wild horse will not breed a tame colt. I remember 
hearing Drummond or Thompson, I do not remember which, say 
in Parliament, in debate on the slave question, with great 
emphasis : " Were a man to attempt to make me a slave I 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 61 

would kill him 1" Now that is all buncomb — who would try ? 
Can any one make the honorable member's hair curl ? face 
black ? nose flat ? Of course not, and it is equally absurd to 
speak of making a negro slave out of an Anglo-Saxon. As the 
churning of milk maketh butter — as the wringing of the nose 
bringeth blood — so such Parliamentary nonsense on the slave 
question breedeth contention with the Americans. 

Let the negropolist explain " the way of the eagle in the air 
— the way of a serpent on the rock — the way of a ship in the 
waters of the sea," before he tries to raise the negro above the 
kitchen. 

The African has been, and will continue to be a one-masted 
frigate. 

"Non-Prejudice" must not expect to raise a breed of short- 
tailed kittens by cutting off the tail of the old cat ! 

A candle lights others, but consumes itself : the anti-slavery 
party reverses the proverb. They expect to reap grapes by 
sowing thorns. When two Sundays meet — when a frog has 
hair — then the mist of slavery can be dispelled with an abolition 
fan ! Since Ham rejoiced at Noah's intoxication — since Judah 
dishonored his child — since Moses broke the Commandments on 
the mountain — the negro race has swept the house, made 
the fires, done the cooking, and always gone out to service. 
Tribulation worketh patience — patience maketh experience — 
experience bringeth hope. — Hence, 

Edward Everett believes " that American slavery is to be the 
ultimate civilization of Africa." The slavocrat presents his com- 
pliments to the negrophobian, with this scriptural advice : 
" Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbor's house, lest he be weary 
of thee, and so hate thee." 

British statesmen know as little of America as Macaulay's New 
Zealander does of London bridge. Members of Parliament sel- 
dom allude to the United States, but when they do, they are 
groping in the dark. Roebuck would show more force in his 
anti-American feeling if more accurate in his statements. Last 



62 the facts; or, 

year I corrected him in the " Times" as to the number of States 
in the Union, and the other day I found him equally wild in his 
information, and consequently sent this letter : 

TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES." 

Waterloo Hotel, Liverpool, January, 21, 1S59. 
My dear sir — Observing the following inaccurate statement, on my arrival 
in the Asia yesterday, I am emboldened by your courtesy on a former 
occasion again to ask permission of you to correct Mr. Roebuck's statistics 
on the United States: 

Extract from his speech at Sheffield.. 

" Times" Report, Jan. 14. 
"I am told to look at America. Look at America, sir. Are there not 
six millions slaves in America? and does not the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence of the Republic state that all men are born free ?" 

The " American Almanac " of last year gives the slave population at 
different periods : 

In 1*790, under Washington, 697,897 

" 1800, under Adams, 893,041 

" 1810, under Madison, 1,191,364 

" 1820, under Monroe, 1,538,064 

" 1830, under Jackson, 2,009,031 

" 1 840, under Van Buren, 2,487,355 

" 1850, under Fillmore, 3,204,089 

And taking the same ratio of increase, in round numbers there are in 1859, 
under Buchanan, 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, or fifty per cent, 
less than stated by Mr. Roebuck ! Yours, etc., " Young America." 



"Don't you think you had better wind up your letters on 
slavery ?" writes a friend to-day. " The cream of the last was 
not quite so thick as usual — with allopathic words you are 
administering homoeopathic ideas — your tight rope is getting 
slack ; your brandy has a watery flavor. I am afraid you are 
running the thing into the ground." That is just exactly what I 
have been trying to do ; but into English, not American ground. 
My words may be soft, but arguments based on fact are hard to 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 63 

withstand. I should have wound up before, but letters, like the 
above, put a writer on his mettle. Let me open one this morn- 
ing from Paris. This time " Belle Brittan " assumes to lecture 
me : 

" Your letters on slavery are incoherent and rhapsodical ; 
your arguments, if properly arranged, would be overpowering. 
But you lack system ; an argument, to be effective, must be built 
up like a pyramid. Drive your nail straight home." 

How strange it is — this fancy which some have of endeavoring 
to remodel others. One man snubs me for doing what another 
recommends. Those who prefer that pulpit style of firstly, 
secondly and thirdly, better adopt it. My style is my own, and 
as I have not written on my forehead, This is a Junius — and as 
these letters have been thrown off, without elaborate prepara- 
tion, from day to day, as the subject extended, I did not expect 
to be criticised as an essayist. A young English planter, long a 
resident of the southern States — recently from Manchester — 
after mature deliberation, in the following letter, assumes to have 
razed my argument to the ground. I copy his comments entire: 



My dear Young America, 

You ask me, as a slaveholder, what are the weak points in your 
" slave papers." I will give you some. 

Why, my dear fellow, the whole idea is a weak one — cui bono ? what do 
you expect to accomplish by them ? Surely not to convert John Bull ? 
Are you not a sufficiently keen observer of character to know that this 
amiable individual is by nature and education not open to argument ? 
Logic passes him by like the idle wind ; satire enrages but does not con- 
vince him, and the tu quoque style of which he accuses you, bounds from 
the density of his mental epidermis like musket balls from the back of a 
hippopotamus. You are fighting a windmill. 

This is the general charge of weakness against you : 

Specification the first. You attempt to prove the rectitude of slavery 
from the Bible. You are very far behind the tactics, and ignorant of the 
position of the enemy, if you do not know that the anti-slavery party have 
long since thrown the Bible overboard. This was done some six years ago, when 
the divine orgin of slavery was most clearly proved by some distinguished 



64: THE FACTS J OK, 

minister of the Christian Church in the South. It was announced to dis- 
ciples of the new school, by one of their high priests, the Rev. Henry 
Ward Beecher, from his pulpit, in words like these — " The Bible has been 
proved to uphold slavery — granted — then I say, perish the Bible, but perish 
slavery!" This was the inauguration of the " higher law." Hear also 
what the arch-angel of anti-slavery, the Rev. (?) Theodore Parker said in 
his pulpit (God save the mark), " If the Saviour of mankind himself, (not 
however denominating him quite so reverently) were to issue a warrant 
for the rendition of a slave fleeing from his master, and send St. Paul to 
execute it, he (Theodore Parker, minister of God's Holy Word) would 
resist it! !" You see, therefore, that what the Bible says is of no sort of 
consequence. 

Specification the second: 

What's the use of telling the Englishmen that they inflicted this curse 
(or blessing) upon us ? Slavery does not exist in England now (by that 
name), therefore it cannot be right. It docs exist (in name) in America ; 
therefore it must be wrong. 

Don't you know that to some minds nothing is harder to forgive than a 
benefit conferred. 

Leaving out of notice the Episcopal See of Manchester, built, nourished, 
and enriched by the profits of slave labor, because all that is comparatively 
new ; why recall to the placid minds of some of the portly and philan- 
thropic gentlemen who roll solemnly through Castle street, Lord street, 
Bond street, and so out into the country, in their stupendous coaches, who 
remind some of the dignified merchants who discuss Cotton and Consols 
on the London, Bristol, and Glasgow Exchanges, that the foundation of 
their fortunes was the African slave trade ? They do not own slaves now, 
— they make atonement every day for the sins of their fathers, by abusing 
us who do own them now, and who have Christianized, fed, and clothed 
four millions of them. Their consciences are as immaculate and un- 
wrinkled as their cravats. Why disturb them? 

See how much better an example is set you by the Manchester magnates. 

Mr. M.P., who buys from me Sea Islands cotton at two to three 

shillings a pound, and never asks me whether the length of staple he so 
much prizes is or is not produced by using worn-out negroes in the light 
of guano ; or the illustrious John Bright himself, Quaker, Philanthropist, 
and Reformer, whom I am proud to reckon among my very best customers 
for short-stapled kinds. He never lectures me about my antecedents. 

There are several other specifications of my charge against your articles 
which I may bring forward hereafter, if you are not, as I anticipate, already 
demolished by these. A Hereditary Slave-owner. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 65 

The moment a Northerner speaks of slavery, some Southern 
planter is sure to find fault with him — admit that you are right 
on some points, on others you are wrong. 

First, wrong in taking such clever men as Parker and Beecher 
at their word, when said word was spoken in the moment of 
anti-slavery excitement — spoken earnestly, it is true — but I can 
but think without reflection. The Bible is the basis of all human 
knowledge, and to speak lightly of its divine precepts, is to dis- 
avow them. 

Second, wrong in supposing that John Bull is not open to 
conviction — once prove to him that you cannot crowd two quarts 
into a pint pot — that two and three do not make seven — I say, 
the moment, by fair argument, you convince him, John Bull is 
every inch a gentleman. 

The more I consider his peculiar temper, the more I respect 
him. Leave Jonathan and John alone over a good round of 
beef and a bottle of good Port; let them discuss, as we are dis- 
cussing, these national questions; Jet them smooth down, as 
they surely will do, the rough places in each other's temper; 
let Jonathan mind his own affairs, and not enlist troops in Eng- 
land for a Cuban expedition; let John devote more of his time 
to home charities, and not buy cotton with one hand and abuse 
America for growing it with the other; let Jonathan cure him- 
self of that odious habit of spitting, and John give up his filthy 
custom of taking snuff ; let both remember that the two nations 
united can dictate to the world, — Charles Mackay divides it 
between them : 

Take you the west and I the east, 

We'll spread ourselves abroad, 
With spade and trade and wholesome laws, 

And faith in man and God. 

Eemember that it is filibustering John who makes the proposal 
to peace-loving Jonathan. 



66 THE FACTS ; OR, 

Take you the west and I the east, 

We speak the self-same tongue, 
That Milton wrote, that Chatham spoke, 

That Burns and Shakspeare sung. 

England and America have statesmen in common, poets in 
common, commerce in common, almost everything in common — 
everything but the slave trade. That, England, with her Euro- 
pean neighbors, must be responsible for. America was not a 
party to the debasing commerce. 

Mary Howitt's " Popular History of the United States of 
America," is most ably reviewed in the " Literary Gazette;" the 
critical reviewer reproves the clever authoress for " shirking v 
the slave question. He wishes to hear her speak of " Sims, of 
Dred Scott, and the negro martyrs, — the Nebraska bill, — the 
Missouri Compromise, and Noah Worcester, the founder of the 
Peace Societies." The truth is, Mary Howitt saw the change 
that is on the age, — aud knew how useless it was to revile 
America for England's crimes. Let the talented editor of the 
" Gazette " visit the slave States, and he, like many of his coun- 
trymen, will follow the example of the historian he censures. 
Slavery is an open sore. Time, and time only, will discover the 
closing remedy. In America slavery is profitable, but England 
never made it pay. Her policy was short-sighted. 

When Holland gave Great Britain Guiana, in 1803, it pro- 
duced 46,435 bales of cotton, and some 10,000.000 lbs. of coffee. 
Three years before, the United States only produced 40,000 
bales ! the quality being 20 per cent, poorer than Guiana ! 

There is another interesting fact showing England's treat- 
ment of her slaves, and suicidal policy with her West Indian 
colonies. In 1808, Great Britain only imported from the United 
States 13,000 bales of cotton, while British Guiana, and other 
Western Islands sent her 103,511 bales ! Is not this a signi- 
ficant fact ? Does not England see her mistake ? Suppose the 
increase had been pro-rata — where then would have been the 
American cotton and susjar States ? 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SDT (?) LIE? 67 

Thirty-two millions of acres in the 100,000 square miles in 
Guiana is cotton soil — 500 pounds the acre soil at that — while 
our southern States seldom get over 300 lbs. Humboldt says 
one acre in Guiana will produce equal to 30 in England, and 
yet see the disastrous condition of the plantations ! 

When America forms societies to improve the condition of 
England's paupers — when clubs and subscriptions are started in 
the United States to arouse public opinion in England, so that 
some more severe penalty than kalf-a-crown a week can be en- 
forced for the maintenance of an illegitimate child ! — when 
George Thompsons visit this country to agitate the social-evil 
question — the Americans will have no objections to Englishmen 
continuing to din into their ears the terrible sin of selling their 
own blood! — but they should remember that we value it at more 
than half-a-crown a week. 

Every man can tame a shrew but he that hath her. 

The abolitionists are always loading cannon to shoot larks. 
Their minds, like their chimneys, need an occasional sweeping 
out, they get so sooty on the black question. They remind me 
of the near-sighted captain who, observing a fly spec on his 
chart, took it for a guano island, and beat his ship round it all 
night ! 

I hope by this time, that English children, should this ever 
fall in their way, will not grow up with the idea that Americans 
introduced the siu of slavery ! 

Americans were not its founders — nor were the Europeans. 
The Africans were the patentees of the institution of negro 
slavery. Italy learnt the art from Africa. Delos was the great- 
est slave mart of antiquity. Ten thousand were sold in one 
day ! 

Did it ever occur to the African philanthropists, when travel- 
ling in Italy and Greece, that most of those beautiful columns 
they admire so much were made by slaves ? When hearing 
Kean hiss through his teeth the words of Shylock, " You have 
among you many a purchased slave, which, like your asses, and 



68 THE FACTS ; OR, 

your dogs, and mules, you hold iu abject and in slavish parts, 
because you bought them," I could but remember that slavery 
was not au American weed. 

Eeforms must come from within, not forced from without. 
Three hundred years ago partition law was public law — a nation 
like an individual can be corrupted. England commits a crime 
in educating her children in utter ignorance of America. But 
there can be no hope without a future — no memory without a 
past. So we will remember the good and hope for a change. 

America is stronger than the rock of Gibraltar. There never 
yet was a place but that had been taken — save America. 
France has had thirteen governments and twelve constitutions 
since America's Independence. The United States has had but 
one. 

Cook, the actor, to whom Kcan's father erected a monument 
in New York, was equally severe upon the good people of 
Liverpool, when he growled from the stage — " You have not a 
brick in any of your warehouses but what is cemented with the 
blood of a negro !" 

America sometime may erase the stain — England never can. 

Emancipation is a dangerous experiment. The latest effort 
was on the west coast of South America. In January, 1854, 
General Castilla emancipated all the slaves in Peru. What is the 
consequence ? The sugar, the rice, and the tobacco crops were 
nearly all lost, and the starving negroes fled to the highways, 
where murder, rapine, and outrage is reported by every incom- 
ing packet. 

The American captains tell me you cannot go from Callao to 
Lima with safety. The ship Lammergeier arrived at Callao last 
December, with a cargo of framed houses, imported by the 
Peruvians, because carpenters or laborers could not be obtained 
since the abolition act. What did the negroes do ? They 
burnt a portion of the frames, took possession of the ship, and 
threw the balance overboard in spite of General Castilla's mili- 
tary force. 



A.T WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 69 

The West Indies did get some payment for their slaves, but 
thus far the Peruvian planters have not received a penny. 

Formerly, it was no unusual sight to see a caravan of forty 
mules, the 'head of one tied to the tail of the -other, laden with 
two bars of silver valued at £1,000 each, from the mines to the 
coast, all under charge of one Peon ! Now, they are obliged to 
have a file of soldiers. 

Peru once grew sugar for exportation ; now, she imports for 
her own consumption. Ecuador is in a similar position. 

The Granadians at Panama amused themselves some two 
years ago by cutting off a Calfornian train. 

Ever since Dr. Johnson's celebrated toast, " Here's to the 
next insurrection of the negro slaves against their oppressors," 
to the recent denunciations against the Americans-slavery has 
flourished, and the planters become enriched— all because 
England has been paying such heavy subsidies to them in her 
purchases of cotton, sugar and tobacco ! 

Stop the cotton importation for twelve months and the price 
of the slave the first year will drop to five hundred dollars- 
continue the prohibition the next year and he will fall to two 
hundred dollars-and keep it out of the country the third year, 
the negro would not be worth the nails in his coffin. 

I appeal to the most intelligent officers of the African squad- 
ron on the slave coast if the results of the Exeter Hall cry have 
not proved it to be, however sincere its advocates may have 
been, the greatest humbug of the age ! The negro will always 

be a negro. 

Providence ordains that talent shall not be hereditary. 

"Physiognomists," said Colonel James to the electors, " say 
that blood perpetuates disease, but God says it cannot perpetu- 
ate talent." Horace had ability, but he never shook off his 
serfdom. Maecenas's patronage-the favor of Augustus-and 
the friendship of Virgil were not sufficient to prevent the con- 
tempt heaped upon him, because so unfortunate as to be the 
son of a freed man. His position was something like that ot 



70 THE FACTS J OR, 

the black lawyer in Boston — the white lawyers would not allow 
him to be present at the banquet. 

Senator Foote, in reply to Senator Seward on the Cuba Bill, 
eloquently asks : 



" Does the Senator imagine, then, that he can devote seas and shores in 
America, as mild and beautiful as the ancient Mediterranean and the gar- 
dens that surround it, to the exclusive dominion of negroes, — driving the 
white men to struggle forever with the ice-bound streams, the pitiless snow- 
drifts, or any of the barriers with which winter would encompass or chain 
our enterprise ?" 



The " Times " places the difference between the dependent 
state of the poor whites and the slavery of the blacks, on the 
ground that one is voluntary, the other not. By this argument 
then the soldier who would desert is just as much a slave as the 
black. 

There are probably as many slaves who will not take their 
freedom as there are soldiers who keep to the ranks. The slaves 
cling to their masters from affection, while the soldier or the 
operative remains solely for his food and raiment. What do 
they care about their officers and employers, or even their Sove- 
reign, beyond the protection or support which directly or indi- 
rectly they afford them ? How will the sallow, ill-dressed, half-fed 
collier, farm laborer, or factory hand compare with the sleek and 
jolly-looking negro ? 

The slavery of the army white man is more abject than that 
of the black man. The law obliges the one to place himself in the 
ranks to be shot down, and if he refuses, objects, hesitates — if 
he dares to desert, or show the least insubordination, he is strung 
up, and put under the lash ! The whip is applied oftener on 
the Saxon soldier than the African slave. Augustine called 
poesy " the wine of demons !" Bacon says, " the mixture of a 
lie doth ever add pleasure." What often appears mountains in 
the distance to the navigator, proves to be vapor as you approach 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 71 

— so the cruelties to the American slave have often been the 
creation of fancy. 



Brantz Mayer, in dedicating " Captain Canot's Twenty Years 
on board a Slaver " to N. P. Willis, says : 

" Men are often too much in a hurry to do good, and mar by excessive 
zeal what patience would complete. The cypress is a thousand years in 
growth ; yet its limbs touch not the clouds, save on a mountain top ! Shall 
the regeneration of a continent be quicker than its ripening ? That would 
be miracle— not progress." 

Henry the Fourth wished every peasant had a fowl in his pot 
on Sunday. The slaves live on the fat of the land, even on week- 
days. In one of the States 200 lbs. of pork are allowed each 
slave per annum, besides his other rations. Olmsted got reviewed 
in the "Times" for his valuable volume describing life among 
the slaves. The slave always partakes of his master's bounty. 
He shares his prosperity ; and in adversity he must be equally 
cared for, for self-interest guarantees good condition. 

In England the pressure of public calamity falls upon the poor 
— upon the working-classes, — not so on the plantations. The 
planter suffers — not the slave. As many cases of cruelty occur 
among free men as among slaves. The selfishness of human 
nature is the best security against brutality. 

Jefferson said that slavery was worse for the white man than 
for the black. Any one must admit, who has observed, that a 
free black, or a poor white, is not as happy at the South as the 
slave. 

Uncle Tom only lived in the imagination of the talented 
novelist. There are brutes in all countries, — but public opinion 
at the South supports the slave against a cruel master. 

When a slave marries a free black woman, his master, from 
humanity, often has to support the children. 

The slave-owner's treatment is the test of his virtue. If 



72 THE FACTS J OK, 

vicious, his cupidity controls him. In mutilating his slave, he 
injures his own pocket. 

The abolition game is almost played out. Have you ever seen 
the used-up prize-fighters mimicked in the circus ? How, with 
eyes half shut, or entirely closed, they stagger up to time ; how 
they flounder about, striking to the right and left — now here, 
now there — hitting nothing, seeing nothing — force all gone — 
strength exhausted ? So the Exeter Hall champions light up 
occasionally, and hit out in the same promiscuous manner (as 
witnessed in the late delegation to Lord Derby, and the Anti- 
slavery Convention at Albany, in the United States) — the by- 
standers equally amused in each case. 

As the British Parliament represents so many pounds, shillings, 
and pence, and so many acres of land — according to Mr. Blight's 
statistics, having little regard to the millions of working-men — 
so the few leaders of the anti-slavery cabal have given ideas to 
our cousins of England regarding America, that are ungenerous, 
unfeeling, and untrue. 

England should commend, not censure, America's progress. 
If she thinks us wrong, she should pity, not despise. She does 
not, and will not, and cannot, understand us until she thinks for 
herself. Zeal without knowledge, is the offspring of folly. The 
" Times " abused us for a generation. Its political editor, Mr. 
John T. Delane, went to America some three years since. I saw 
him on his return : and what I was most rejoiced to see, although 
his visit was a brief one, was that his views of the country had 
entirely changed. 

Wise men change their minds — fools never do. From that 
day the "Times" has treated America with nobler sentiments. 

On the Slave question — the Mexican question — the Cuban 
question — the "Times" is gradually turning public opinion 
toward the United States — endeavoring to untie the knot its 
former policy had drawn so firmly. 

Let Americans receive their share of the stigma of slavery — 
if it is a stigma — but not take blame that belongs to others. 



AT WHOSE DOOK DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 73 

America does not require England's advice on this question, 
any more than England does America's regarding the " social 
evil." 

When the poor drayman's horse dropped down and broke the 
cart, the crowd, as usual, showered any quantity of sympathy 
upon him. A Frenchman, standing near, said, " How much you 
pity ? You talk— you feel bad — you no pity. I feel same way. 
/ pity man ten dollar." 

England's abolition sympathy will be better appreciated by a 
few five-pound notes, as a nest-egg for the emancipation fund. If 
liberating the slave is lending to his Maker, the investment will 
pay better than Consols. 

The Broughamites promise like a merchant ship — they should 
pay like a man-of-war. Words come like hailstones, but nothing 
else. Old bees yield no honey. 

War with the white man — peace with the black — is the Palm- 
erstonian doctrine. 

When the Pharisees brought to the Saviour the woman taken 
in adultery, to see whether he would execute the Mosaic Law, 
He wrote upon the sand, " Let him that hath no sin, cast the 
first stone ;" one by one they sneaked away, — the woman was 
left alone. He told her to " go and sin no more." 

England rebukes America with as bad taste on this slave ques- 
tion. 

Lola Montez, after leading the most remarkable life of any 
woman living, as gay as it is romantic, astonishes the world by 
her cleverness in lecturing our wives and daughters on the ques- 
tion of morals ! 

A man who has made his fortune in selling rum, gin and 
brandy, must be a bold man to come out as a temperance lec- 
turer. 

So it seems strange to Americans to see England abhor the 
monster that she created ; with royal tenderness she cherished 
the nursling, but strives to strangle the full grown giant ! See 
what she is doing even in our time. Read these extracts from 

4 



74 

" Anti-Slavery Kecollections," addressed to Mrs. Beeclier Stowe, 
and dedicated to Lord Brougham by Sir George Stephen 
(p. 41) : 

" Strong and extensive as the abhorrence of the traffic was at home, 
there was a large and powerful body who loved it as dearly as their trans- 
atlantic mortgagers and debtors. The slave trade was to Liverpool then 
what the emigration trade is now. Manchester and Birmingham manu- 
facturers lived by it. • London and Glasgow merchants grew wealthy by 
West Indian consignments. Two-thirds of the plantations were held in 
fee or in security by English houses ; and these men, one and all, knew, 
like your Legrees, that buying was cheaper than breeding. Identified in 
interest, they lied in common with the planters ; and to make their lies 
pass current, they gave turtle dinners, rolled in splendid equipages, sup- 
ported public charities, railed at saints, bought rotten boroughs, and 
always voted with the ministers. It was more difficult then than now, to 
tell the honorable member for East Retford or Shoreham, that ' he lied in 
his throat,' and yet honorable members did lie, and indorsed any falsehood 
and contradicted every truth that came from a sugar colony. 

"Then, again, these men banded together like the Forty Thieves; they 
sold their votes in the lump, they had their own whipper-in, and were 
flogged down to St. Stephen's in a body to support Government at a 
division; but it was 'for a consideration,' and that 'consideration' was, 
hostility to anti-slavery saints; through thick and thin, through dirt and 
filth political, they would wade knee-deep so long as they were duly paid 
in pro-slavery coin." 

England cultivated, with Parliamentary care, the lucrative 
germ, but is nauseated with the fruit. 

She burns down our house, and then gives an alarm of fire. 

Disease is the tax on pleasure. The sins of the father are 
entailed upon the son. 

When mankind rule lust, temper the tongue, and bridle the 
belly, England can give the cold shoulder to American slavery 
with better grace. An offender never pardons, says the proverb. 
Will not England be an exception ? 

In 1708, the committee of the House of Commons reported : 
" The African slave trade is important, and ought to be free." 

The same committee reported, in 1711, that the "American 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 75 

plantations ought to be supplied with negroes at reasonable 
rates." 

The next year Queen Anne congratulated Parliament upon her 
" success in finding, in Spanish America, a new market for 
slaves." 

In 1729, George II. granted supplies to the African forts, for 
the protection of ships engaged in the slave trade. 

The petition of the Liverpool Merchants, in 1145, reads : 
" The African slave trade is the great pillar and support of the 
British plantations in America !" 

Between 1700 and 1750 the British ports were filled with 
slavers. During this short period 1,500,000 souls were kid- 
napped in Africa — one-eighth of which perished on the voyage ! 
The bed of the ocean beneath the slaver's track is paved with 
the bones of the negro ! 

The slave trade party was all powerful, and dictated laws to 
England, as the opium party have done to-day. 

11 Commerce first, Christianity afterward," was Lord Elgin's 
reply to the missionary. 

Under William and Mary the Commons resolved to open the 
trade in negroes, "for the better supply of the plantations." 
You will find this upon England's statutes : 

" The trade is highly beneficial and advantageous to the king- 
dom and the colonies." 

Kings and queens derived pin-money from it, and royal decrees 
gave it support. A century of successive ministries voted for it 
and encouraged it. 

In 1727, South Carolina made complaints to the Governor 
against the "vast importation of negroes." Governor Ogle- 
thorpe would not have them in Georgia. "If slaves were 
brought into the State, he must leave it." 

In 1749 — only ten years before Robert Burns was born — the 
royal restrictions were removed from the trade, and it was 
opened to public competition — for, reads the statute, "The 
slave-trade is very advantageous to Great Britain." 



76 THE FACTS ; OR, 

It was about this time that Holt and Polexfen, and eight 
other judges decided that " negroes were lawful merchandise." 
This decision was made in order that England could have the 
entire trade to herself, as specified in the treaties. 

The law of insurance in the United States places slaves as 
freight, paving general average, and not as passengers. 

I again repeat that it is morally wrong to educate the child- 
ren of England in such gross ignorance regarding America. 

Every child that can read should have an opportunity of 
knowing that England cursed us with the disease before she 
taunted us with ineffectual remedies. Walpole says there is 
nothing true in history but dates. Englishmen enjoy facts. 
Here arc some more forty-shillings-in-a-pound truths. 

First, England sent to America convicts ; then Charles II. 
sent out a shipment of Dissenting Quakers (are the Gurneys 
aware of that ?) ; then the Lord Jefifery Redemptionists ; then 
African slaves. But the convicts, the Quakers, and the appren- 
tices were also sold as slaves. 

In 1101, my native city, Boston, instructed her representa- 
tives " to put au end to the period of negroes being slaves," and 
the first Continental Congress resolved " that no slaves be 
imported into any of the Thirteen Colonies !" 

Bancroft estimates that, during the century previous to 1776, 
three millions of negroes were imported by the English— two 
hundred and fifty thousand of whom were thrown into the 
Atlantic Ocean ! Contemplate, for a moment, that British ship- 
owners have thrown into the sea more than half the population 
of Liverpool, in African captives. 

President Madison said that the " British Government con- 
stantly checked Virginia's endeavor to stop the slave traffic." 

The Earl of Dartmouth, the very year before the American 
Congress of 1776 abolished it, wrote to the Government ageut, 
on behalf of the Ministry : " We cannot allow the colonies to 
check or discourage, in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to 
the nation." 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 77 

These tell-tale statutes fasten the crime on England. She 
may dodge — she may shrink — she may turn at every corner — 
but there are the records. The facts are registered in the 
archives of the nation. 

England prowled over the ocean, like a roaring lion — seeking 
what commerce she could devour. She got a taste of the slave- 
trade, and, wherever she sailed, like Caesar, " she came, she saw, 
she conquered." 



I am indebted to my friend, Mr. Gillilan, for a copy of that 
original work by his talented young relative, " Dore," where the 
clever author, writing of the blacks, thus makes Jonathan 
soliloquize : 

"Unfortunate inheritance, I would you were all on the coasts 
of Congo ! For you, my children quarrel ; for you, false 
philanthropists become martyrs ; for you, the press of Europe 
studiously sow the seeds of dissension in my happy family ; for 
you, they dare bandy about the word Disunion, that its hateful 
sound may become familiar to the ears of those on our beloved 
soil who but lately banished the thought of it even as high treason; 
for you, happy as ye are, thousands would see the land reeking 
with blood and ruin. Abstract principles would snatch the 
bread from your mouths, as well as from the mouths of myriads 
more, to carry out an idea — to free you on the spot from bond- 
age, to make you the slaves of misery !" 

After admitting that slavery in the abstract is wrong — that 
he had no right to enslave his fellow man, Jonathan continues : 

" But if I have the slave already, and if he has lost his capa- 
bilities of self-government, and even of self-protection, by long 
generations of inherited servitude, or, indeed — which is more 
nearly the truth — if he never possessed such capacities, then I 
have a very great responsibility upon me, and commit a crime by 
immediate emancipation under a romantic idea of abolishing 
one." Still, speaking of his black boys, he says : 



78 the facts; or, 

" Ye compose nearly an eighth of my population, and, believe 
me, ye are happier than the lower eighth of any nation on earth. 

" Could ye go over the world and see those sad lower eighths 
— yea, and in some places a few of the higher eighths — ye would 
thank God for your position. 

" My black boys, a book is yet to be written about those lower 
eighths which live in countries whose highest eighths weep over 
your miseries as they weep over plays on the stage, which will 
make your blood curdle with horror ! Ye have to work, it is 
true ; it is our universal curse ; but your work is not harder 
than that of the majority of mankind, and, unlike them, you 
have no trouble or thought for the morrow. Ye have plenty to 
eat and drink ; ye have a kind doctor and attention when ye are 
sick ; ye have a good bed to lie upon at night, while that sad 
eighth of which I speak have either none, or lack some of these 
things. 

" My black boys, if you had seen, as I have, a cargo of 
your brethren landed from Africa on the shores of Cuba, you 
would think there was a great deal more difference between you 
and them than between them and monkeys ; beside them your 
faces shine with the superior lustre and intelligence that distin- 
guish the white face when placed beside your own. It was a 
wicked thing to take you away from your own country, but it 
has raised you infinitely in the scale of being ; it has made you 
less a slave than you were before, and it may yet be the means of 
elevating and redeeming your whole race. 

" My black boys, the world is full of misery, of which you can 
have no idea. Your greatest measures of human trouble being 
the pain of a whipping, which the majority of you never felt 
even, but may have heard of, and not having known the sweets 
of liberty, ye do not even long for it any more than ye long to 
be in Africa or Boston, or any other land of which ye know 
nothing and never think. Then I truly think that ye enjoy life 
as much as at least one half of the human race. To be sure, a 
few of us look down from our high stations, and, placing our- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 79 

selves in your position, wonder how ye can be happy, or, rather, 
how we could be, under like circurnstauces. Judging in this 
way, every man below the king is miserable in the king's eyes, 
though happy in his own ; and perhaps that is a right belonging 
even to slaves — to judge of their own happiness. 

" My black boys, do not believe those your best friends who 
shed most tears in your behalf. There are tears which assuage 
none, and there are dry eyes which wipe away tears. The 
luxury of tears is as necessary to mau as the luxury of 
smiles ; and those with whom life is a continual sunshine seek 
this luxury as they do others, driving in carriages to enjoy it in 
theatres on cushioned seats, and with accompaniments of music, 
dress, gas, and suppers, whereas they might have had more real 
cause for tears nearer home. Or they view the stage at a 
distance of 1,500 or 3,000 miles, and the actors are black, and 
they perform their parts so well under the master direction of a 
Stowe that the amphitheatre of a world weeps — weeps in com- 
fort at a distance, while misery in every shape is pleading for 
pity and succor at their doors. But tara ra ra la la goes the 
music, and ten times ten thousand cambric handkerchiefs dry 
sympathizing eyes, and crack goes the whip, drowning — the 
crack of that single whip, at a distance of thousands of miles — 
drowning the groans of myriads of human beings who can not 
be heard because they happen to be of an unromantic color — 
white, and at an unromantic distance — near home, and because 
the audience don't go to the play to dispense charities, but to 
have a good cry. And you might say to this audience, How 
much untruth may be conveyed by an improper way of represent- 
ing truth ? And you might suggest to them that, as life is not 
very long, it would be better to cease crying and commence 
doing; and that, since the relief of the misery of mankind is 
the grand object, at present, with all benevolent minds, it would 
be more systematic as well as charitable to begin with the most 
miserable first, just as a surgeon attends first to the wants of 



80 THE FACTS ; OR, 

his most dangerously-wounded patients. But then, my boys, it 
would be long before your turn would come ! 

" Still, I wish ye were all in Congo, instead of increasiug upou 
my hands at the rate of more than 70,000 annually, or in more 
rapid ratio than any other race on earth, which at least shows 
how easy your condition is. 

"But I assume the responsibility, as my son Jackson said. I 
will keep ye and take care of ye until some one can give satis- 
factory evidence of being better able to do so than myself. If 
the world cannot take care of the poor and wretched now at 
their charge, what will they do when 3,000,000 more are thrown 
upon their charities ? 

" So, my black boys, as long as you have a good dinner with- 
out the trouble of seeking it, a good bed, and plenty of fresh 
air, believe that your masters are your best friends ; and after 
picking cotton all day iu the field, don't go home and pass sleep- 
less nights, making your brains as kinky as your hair in trying 
to decide if Philip Francis were really Junius, or if the man in 
the iron mask was the son of Louis XIV. and the Duchesse de la 
Valliere, or if his mask were velvet instead of iron." 

Professor Ampere, member of the Academie Fran9aise, was 
at Cuba and at New Orleans. He was disgusted with slavery, 
but saw " no more than the first day any practical means of 
immediate deliverance." 



He approves of amalgamation — I do not — mulattoes are 
physically inferior — although white blood makes them mentally 
superior to the black. The mulatto is vicious, untamable. He 
chafes in harness, and becomes a cruiser beyond Rareyfication. 
Dore suggests what I have before touched upon — stop the 
sugar and the coffee — Charity begins at home. 

Two centuries hence he thinks that the world will say that 
"the greatest blessing that ever happened to Africa was the 
slavery of a portion of her people in the United States." 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 81 

British tourists from America formerly spread before their 
readers a report of slave advertisements. Not a hundred years 
ago they would have found as many as they had space for iu 
the journals of London, Liverpool, and Bristol. 

Here is a sample, which I copy (page t6) from the " History 
of Liverpool," in the year 1116 : 

" To be sold by Auction, at George's Coffee-house, between the hours 
of six and eight o'clock, a Fine Negro Girl, about eight years of age, 
very healthy, and hath been some time from the Coast. Any person 
willing to purchase the above, may apply to Captain Robert Syers, Mr. 
Barkley Hodgetts, mercer and draper, near the Exchange, where she may 
be seen till the time of sale." 

Let me add another pargraph from the same page. 

" On Thursday, 12th of June, 1766, a journeyman-plasterer, in a drunk 
frolic-, sold his wife to a sailor for thirty-six shillings and a gallon of beer, 
at an ale-honse in Rosemary-lane. He had been married to her only a 
fortnight. The woman, who seemed nothing loath, walked quietly away 
with her purchaser, a fiddler playing before them. In the same year the 
slave trade was in full vigor. The merchants in Liverpool were deeply 
embarked in it." 

Is this horrible wife-selling custom eradicated from page of 
English history even now ? If not, it is time it was ! 

The same work (page 85,) states that as late as 1800, the 
Liverpool docks were packed with slavers, most of which had 
painted on their sterns — 

"allowed to carry three hundred slaves." 

The grievous extent to which the " merchant princes " of 
Liverpool carried this horrible traffic can be estimated by the 
statistics which I have given from the custom-house records. 
For every man, woman, and child residing in this populous town, 
three negroes lie buried amid the shells of the Atlantic bed 1 
For every individual in this great port, one negro has been 

4* 



82 THE FACTS ; OK, 

landed alive on the plantations of America ! Equal to one- 
half of the entire population of Australia survived, but thrice 
that number perished before the Liverpool shipowners realized 
their profits ! 

England administers the poison, and in a wild state of excite- 
ment sends for the doctor ! " Take the money out of his 
pocket," said Fagin to the Artful Dodger, " but don't break the 
law I" 

The abolitionists, like Samson's foxes with fire-brands at 
their tails, (read in the original Hebrew bundles of wheat, 
instead of foxes) have seriously damaged the crop of good 
intentions that was growing up among the planters. 

Coleridge thought that people who were always mourning 
over the condition of their neighbors were generally unhappy in 
their own marriage relations. 

The cock in the fable preferred one barley-corn to all the 
precious stones in the world. So Americans would like acts of 
charity, not honeyed words. There is a Spanish proverb that 
says, " the cord breaketh at last by the weakest pull." 

The Romans conquered Egypt without resistance ; but when a 
Roman soldier killed a cat in Alexandria, the people rose up 
and tore him limb from limb. Who can be surprised that slave- 
owners sometimes go past the bounds of prudence ? They 
despise Isms. — Do you find Shakers or Quakers at the South ? 
No. Socialists, Rappists, Fourierists, Durkees ? No — you would 
as soon meet an abolitionist — Luther sainted — Leo canonized — 
and Paris may license Lorettes, but slave-owners alone must be 
outlaws of society ! 

I never saw a thumb-screw, chains, manacles, the nine tail 
cat ; burning, maiming and such words are the abolitionists' 
stock in trade. 

Ninety-nine facts may make a falsehood, but the hundredth 
added or alone gives the Truth. 

Would the English give back the land to the ancient Briton ? 
Would the New England abolitionist restore the country to the 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LEE? 83 

Red Indian ? How then expect the southerner to give back 
the property that was left him by his sires ? 

Depend upon it, American slavery tames the savage — 
enlightens the ignorance, softens the ferocity, and civilizes the 
barbarity of the African negro. He is indifferent to personal 
liberty, and is wanting in domestic affection. 



Like a gasping fish upon the beach, abolitionism is making its 
last throe. 

The candle bursts out afresh just before the light is extin- 
guished. The fever disappears, and the patient brightens a 
little while, before the breath leaves its temporal home, — so the 
Anti-slavery party, in their recent declarations, show evident 
signs of being on their last legs — like a Liverpool pilot in a fog 
— they are sailing round and round the "Bell Buoy." 

Everybody is partial to his own art, own books, own house, 
own country — so the Emancipationists love their hobby as them- 
selves. 

Every mother thinks her baby best. 

The world declines being fooled any longer — the Abolition 
ostrich gains nothing by hiding its head under the cloak of 
Coolie emigration. The world is improving. Barbarism is dis- 
appearing — cannibalism is going out — mastodons are of the 
past — ravenous animals are growing scarce — poisonous weeds 
and roots are hardly to be found — hogs are getting fewer and 
fewer-— the devil himself has been deposed 1 — and I trust the 
day may not be far distant when negro slavery will be only a 
matter of history ! 



The editorial comments on the "peculiar institution " in the 
" Northern Times," and " Non Prejudice's " second letter in Fri- 
day's paper, contain some points that I will touch upon. The 
editor indorses Mr. Grattan's opinions 1 so will most English- 



84 THE FACTS ; OR, 

men who see slavery only as a "sentiment." Of two evils 
choose the least. Is not slavery preferable to civil war ? Can 
the slaves be emancipated without bloodshed ? Most statesmen 
think not. 

The sympathies of Christianity are Africanized — there is none 
for their own blood and race. The recapitulation of the main 
evils of slavery in " civilized America," are thus summed up : 

"1st. The breeding of slaves for sale like cattle, and the consequent 
encouragement to their rapid increase. 

" 2nd. Their total ignorance, and comparative want of useful instruc- 
tion, religious or secular. 

" 3rd. The barbarous and brutalizing floggings. 

" 4th. The separation of families. 

" 5th. The abandonment of the free blacks by their former masters, 
from whom they have purchased their liberty, and by the white popula- 
tion in general making them objects of contempt and loathing to the eman- 
cipated. 

" 6th. The domestic slave trade, between breeder and dealer, and be- 
tween State and State, openly legalized in America, while the same 
trade is pronounced by law to be piracy if carried on in Africa or the 
high seas." 

If the South refused to buy the slaves of the District of 
Columbia, we should hear no threat of emancipation on the 
border. 

Admitting that picture exaggerated and over-painted, as he 
has made it, look at this which you copy. 

The one was slavery in America — the other is slavery in Eng- 
land. 

" That poor workmen are basely treated by their employers, that ruf- 
fians cruelly beat their wives, that wives and mothers poison their hus- 
bands and children, that our peasantry are uneducated, and our manufac- 
turing classes immoral, are all undeniable and melancholy facts. The arti- 
ficial state of society in England, the inequality of fortunes, the super- 
abundance of population, the short-sighted pride of aristocracy, the ava- 
rice of wealthy manufacturers, the sectarian virulence of portions of the 
clergy of all creeds, the subserviency of many among the gentry and 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 85 

the middle classes of the domineering great — these are among the causes 
of evils which are admitted and deplored. Parliament is busily employed 
for their redress. Our most eloquent authors and speakers wage an un- 
ceasing war against the prevalence of those abuses in our social system. 
Numberless societies exist for their amelioration. Funds to a large 
amount are subscribed to carry out the various projects of improvement. 
No body of men of any influence, no individuals of either sex, venture to 
palliate the existence of these ills ; nor does any one object to the inter- 
ference of foreigners, whether exerted in England or elsewhere, in point- 
ing out, or devising remedies for, our abounding defects. But were those 
blots upon our boasted greatness ten times more disfiguring than they are, 
were our priests more bigoted, our peers more haughty, our commoners 
more cringing, our parliament less active ; did the sempstresses work their 
worn fingers still closer to the bone, or sordid mill owners drive their 
operatives still faster to exhaustion, or were all their vices inherent in our 
nature, and inseparable from civilization a thousand fold greater than 
they are among us, could all that combination justify slavery in America?" 

Justify slavery ? of course not. But we can put the saddle 
on the right horse — England is the party of the first part as 
well as the second. 

Save the sentiment, one system is as bad as the other. The 
only difference is the color. When Mr. Grattan wrote these 
views, I am surprised that he did not moralize on England's hav- 
ing stamped this iniquity on our country. Why does he remind 
us of the crime, and forget the real criminal ? Is it for friendly- 
motives ? 

The cotton manufacturer is virtually the real protector of sla- 
very. He gets the lion's share. If it be an evil (for the sake of 
argument), that which is opposed to wrong is far from being 
right. 

There is one thing, however, the cotton dealer must soon 
learn, and that is that New Orleans, not Liverpool, in future will 
rule its price — the times are changing. 

" The hatred of an enemy is bad enough ; but no earthly 
poison equals in its intensity the hatred of a friend." 

Mr. Grattan wishes America to admit the wrong of slavery, 
and English sarcasm will cease. America will admit the wrong 



86 THE FACTS ; OR, 

which England forced upon her, but claims the right of manag- 
ing her own business. He did not show in the foregoing quota- 
tion of misery in England, that America was always dinning it 
into England's ears. Not at all. America has heard of the 
success of the party who got a good living by giving strict at- 
tention to his own affairs, hence allows England to take care of 
her own people. America simply demands the same right. He 
concludes the paragraph thus : 

" Could southern slaveholders be acquitted at the bar of public justice 
for maintaining, or cotton buyers at the North for defending it ? Or 
should Englishmen be debarred from publicly denouncing what they all 
abhor? The fact is that it cannot be defended nor palliated; and what is 
worse, there is but small chance of its being soon remedied, and none 
that I can see of its being finally abolished. Admitting all this, we in 
England would be quite satisfied if Americans admitted it as well. If a 
bold and straight-forward sentiment of anti-slavery existed in the United 
States, if what is undeniable as a fact was avowed to be an abomina- 
tion, and if means were adopted to abate it ever so insufficient, or with 
results ever so remote, the reproaches of Europe would cease, sarcasm be 
still, and America be cordially met and cooperated with on the broad road 
of philanthropy. But as long as the country which boasts of liberty che- 
rishes slavery in its very heart, as long as the States which are really free 
fraternize with those that hold bondage as a privilege, and man an article 
of barter and sale ; as long as the spinners of cotton make common cause 
with those who grow it, and while both combine to crush the gene- 
rous few who fight the battle of emancipation, so long will the voice of 
the old world be raised against those obnoxious portions of the new." 

You see he still makes no mention of England's sewing the 
stripes on the flag — not a word of her buying the cotton — not a 
line about its early history or present growth. As usual the 
thirty-nine articles of the abolition faith are all indefinite ! 

The man who cannot see on the plain will not improve his 
sight by going on the mountain. 

Watts says, " Memory depends upon the temperature of the 
brain." From the low state of the mercury, there must always 
have been a storm in the abolition mind. In passing through 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 87 

the slave States, Mr. Grattan must have luxuriated on one of his 
own country jaunting-cars — where you only see one side of the 
institution ! 

"It is ignorance, and not knowledge, that rejects instruction ; 
it is weakness, and not strength, that refuses cooperation." So 
is it envy, and not generosity, that stimulates abuse ; jealousy, 
and not affection that characterizes the Grattanite sentiments. 
" Envy keepeth no holidays." 

Perhaps I cannot do better than introduce a letter, just at 
hand, showing a southerner's disgust at the abolition treatment 
of Mr. Randolph's slaves : 

" London, March 19, 1859. 
"My dear Young America: 

"I have just read the first numbers of 'Young America' on sla- 
very, in the 'Northern Times.' While there are some points in which I 
do not entirely concur, the treatise is faithful and forcible, and in the 
main, worthy of high commendation. Its perusal has given me great 
pleasure. 

" Especially are you right in ascribing the clamor against slavery to 
the ' sentiment, and not the fact.' Nor is this true only of the Exeter Hall 
votaries. It is applicable equally at home, in our own free States. The 
fanaticism that grows so rank and gross in those sections, is not always 
the offspring of ignorance — here, you justly charge it to this cause. There, 
it is the coinage of wicked brains and wicked hearts for wicked purposes. 
These are the political demagogues — the leaders, who disease and corrupt 
the well-meaning and honest, but ignorant masses, by pandering to the 
morbid and sickly sentimentality of their weaker minds — they are simply 
common swindlers of public opinion. The fanaticism here, in old Eng- 
land, if not the offshoot of our home production, is at least, fertilized 
by it. 

" There are three kinds of men that are " abolitionists " in the common 
sense of the term— Bad men— Mad men— and Ignoramuses ! The last have 
our toleration, however they excite our disgust. The second have our 
honorable and sincere sympathy. The first, being the common enemy of 
man and all good things, deserve our word-knife to the hilt! It is these 
who beget the false and misnamed philanthropy, that waters the earth 
with crocodile tears. 

" There are Englishmen too that belong to this last party ; of such is 
Mr. Grattan, who, I observe, is receiving your terrible consideration in 



88 THE FACTS ; OR, 

another Liverpool journal. Judas Iscariot was ' short,' and earned thirty 
pieces of silver. He had at least the manliness not to live and spend it. 
An English writer— of good name, and it should be of gentle blood — breaks 
the bread and drinks the wine of a generous host, and then libels all about 
him. To what end? ' Thirty pieces of silver!' Aye, and lives to spend 
them ! Comparisons, are sometimes fearful, as well as odious ! Of such 
also is Charles Dickens, but not ' of such,' may we hope, ' is the Kingdom 
of Heaven!' 

" Now, I am a conscientious believer in slavery. I believe in the moral, 
social, and religions health of the institution. I believe it, under our 
system in the United States, to be a blessing to both races — elevating the 
superior, and ameliorating, in all respects, the condition of the inferior. 
But I protest I am not a fanatic. I do not quarrel with those who differ 
with me. Some of the purest men, and most earnest patriots in our 
country are opposed to slavery. Such men have my highest respect, for 
they are defenders of right — of justice, and would not ruthlessly wrest 
from their brethren in equality, that which is their own legally recognized 
property. This is the most beautiful feature of our Governmental system 
— thirty-three States, their equal rights and sovereignty intact and unshorn, 
revolving around a great common centre ! 

" You have clearly shown, that the meddlesome interference of ' aboli- 
tionists ' at home and abroad, is the most cruel thing th?t could be done 
for the slave for whom they profess so much sympathy. It forces upon 
the masters a necessity for stricter discipline, and renders a happy and 
contented being miserable and wretched. Verily might they cry aloud, 
* Save me from my friends.' Coming from a free State as you do, the 
manly defence you are making of the institution of a portion of your 
country, proclaims you the true friend of the slave, as well as of the 
master. The gratitude of both are due to you. 

" But I will give you an illustration (that may be at least interesting to 
you, while you are upon this subject) both of the contented condition of 
the slaves in the South, and the genuineness of the philanthropy of these 
dear lovers of the negroes : 

" ' John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia's eccentric but great statesman, 
died some twenty-five years ago, possessed of a large estate, real and 
personal. Comprised in it were about 400 slaves, derived mainly by in- 
heritance. The health of Mr. Randolph was habitually delicate— indeed, I 
suppose he never had a well day during three score years and upward, 
that were alloted to him. There were periods, however, when his sufferings 
were intense, affecting both mind and body, and the former so seriously, 
that it is at least doubtful whether it were not unhinged. This, added to 
a naturally eccentric nature — not uncommon to men of great genius — made 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 89 

him do and say, oftentimes, very inconsistent things. It is not surprising, 
therefore, that with so large a property, and without any heir of his body 
(though two half brothers to whom he was devotedly attached) this eccen- 
tricity should have manifested itself in making a disposition of it. The 
consequence was, he left several wills and revoking codicils, as contra- 
dictory one of the other as the peculiar condition of mind at the different 
periods when they were made. As one of these wills — not the last — eman- 
cipated his slaves, and stipulated that they should be removed to a free 
State, providing also the means for the purchase of lands for their per- 
manent settlement, a protracted litigation ensued. After many trials and 
re-trials — decisions in favor of this will or that codicil — it was finally 
decreed that the will emancipating the slaves should stand. Under its 
provisions, the executor proceeded to the State of Ohio, and purchased a 
tract of land for 30,000 dollars— the sum decreed by the court to be fur- 
nished from the estate — upon which the negroes were to be settled. There 
was, perhaps, no portion of Ohio which was more characterized for its 
philanthropic interest in the unhappy slave than this selected — and 
naturally if not wisely — by the executor. Having paid for the land, secured 
the titles, and made other preliminary arrangements for the exodus of the 
400, from the home of their nativity, the day came for their departure. I 
would not stir the kind souls of Exeter Hall to pity and to tears, by de- 
picting the heart-rending incidents of that parting scene ! It is enough 
to say, that to those poor creatures it was the bitterest draught of their 
lives. But the inexorable decrees of law must be obeyed, and the once 
happy and joyous slaves go forth bowed down in sorrow, and in woe, 
under the far more galling yoke of involuntary freedom ! 

" ' Upon their approach to the lands purchased with their own money 
for their settlement, an organized hostile demonstration was made to their 
coming — the Philanthropists were up in arms — literally in arms to oppose 
their well-beloved slaves, released by Virginian law from their bondage, 
taking possession of their newly-purchased and fully paid-for homes ! The 
law carried the day — the settlement was effected — most of the poor creatures 
sickened and died — and some even successfully petitioned the General 
Assembly of Virginia to allow them to return — and that is the fate of the 
four hundred ! ' 

" Madame Roland, casting her last earthly glance upon the Temple of 
Liberty, passionately exclaimed, ' Oh Liberty ! what crimes are committed 
in thy name !' 

" Abolition philanthropy — where is thy blush? 

" Excuse the unexpected, and perhaps unacceptable, length of this letter 
— also the haste, so evident, with which I have been forced to write it. 



90 THE FACTS J OE, 

Accept my sincere thanks for your good work, and the thanks of my 
brethren in the South — may I not say — of every true American? 

" Your friend, Old Virginia." 



Mr. Levy of Savannah, told me that Theodore Randolph, the 
brother of John, emancipated three hundred and fifty negroes, 
and left money for their support till the farms he parcelled out 
on the Roanoke yielded sufficient for their livelihood. Mr. 
Randolph's nephew told him some years ago, that not one owned 
a foot of the land at that time, and all turned out vagabonds. 

In consequence of this his opinions changed. It was natural. 
The negro becomes demoralized by freedom, morally as well as 
physically. 

11 Old Virginia " writes like a Junius. His pen stings. He 
is too severe on the abolitionists. They deserve much, not all, 
that he says. I cannot agree with him that they are " Bad-men, 
Mad-men, and Ignoramuses." They were neither bad, nor mad, 
but ignorant of the subject. Like Jonah's gourd, the sentiment 
grew to sickly fi eight. It was the black-eyed monster that made 
the negro-meat it fed upon. The abolition cradle soon became 
larger than the King of Bashan's bed; it was made within the 
sound of bow-bells. A French mayor levied a tax on all beggars 
for a poor fund. The abolitionists were equally consistent. None 
of them would pick the thorn out of their black brother's foot 
and place it in their own. Silver may represent Love, iron 
symbolize Knowledge, and gold typify Wisdom ; but the abusing 
of Americans is not emblematic of charity to Africans. 

" Old Virginia " misunderstands me if he considers me an 
advocate for perpetual slavery— I am not, I want to see free- 
dom sound its trumpet so that it may be heard in the uttermost 
parts of the earth. Out of Thompsonian-ism sprung Allopathy — 
Allopathy was succeeded by Homoeopathy — and Homoeopathy 
must soon withdraw in favor of Hydropathy; so cannibalism 
was followed by slave trade — slave trade was succeeded by in- 
troducing among the slaves Christianity— and the next state is 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 91 

freedom : the creator has arranged it, and Nature declines going 
into details. 

"Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; 
but wanton love corrupteth and imbaseth it," is Baconian philo- 
sophy. 

Under the latter I place the negrophobist's affection for the 
negro! as Sydney Smith said, when proving Canning's unfitness 
for office — 

11 Butterflies cannot teach bees how to suck honey." 

Abolitionism was a hot-house plant — a nine days wonder. It 
was fashionable, but just now it is a little out of date. Negro- 
mania has gone to seed, nay more, it is undergoing decomposi- 
tion. Like Pharoah's lean kine, the negrophobists grow thinner 
and thinner. 

Vice and misery are the children of ignorance. So misrepre- 
sentation of America grew out of abolition exaggerations. 

Polygamy was once sacred, now it is secular. Negro-mania 
was once a party cry, now it is begun to decay. The world has 
opened its eyes, — a leaf close to the sight may obstruct a distant 
mountain. So this Exeter Hall movement has prevented the 
English people from fraternizing with their blood relations in 
America. How can they love black strangers better than white 
kindred ? The abolitionists were always picking up pawns on 
the chess board, and always getting stalemated. They played 
badly notwithstanding they packed the cards. 

All colors are the same in the dark. So in the ebony closet 
white Americans appeared like black Africans to eye-glassed 
Europeans. It became a fashion to abuse America. Let us 
change it and be friends ! 

I was astonished to find that in Constantinople dcgs were 
sacred to the Turks,— in Cairo that cats were cherished by the 
Egyptians — In Canton that vermin were protected against harm 
by the Chinese beggars !— in Calcutta that reptiles were not 
molested by the Hindoos ; but none of these strange habits are 
so surprising as the fact that negroes are allowed the first class 



92 THE FACTS J OK, 

seat in the abolition mind, while Americans are stowed away in 
the luggage van. Abolitionism was all the fashion a quarter of 
a century since. Old maids drank it with their tea ; old 
bachelors ate it with their soup ; school girls curled it with 
their hair ; school-boys spun it with their top ; babies drank in 
the sentiment with their mother's milk ; it helped statesmen into 
power ; furnished matter for the journals ; and, at one time, 
absorbed public opinion. Not to be an abolitionist was not to 
be in fashion. 

What do you say for changing the sympathy from compara- 
tively happy slaves in America to unhappy negroes in Africa ? 
Make it fashionable to praise America and abuse Africa. The 
former country has a better army and a better navy than the 
latter, in case of any trickery on the Continent. Make it as 
fashionable to treat an American merchant as well in fact as 
you do an African slave in sentiment. 

Fashion can do anything, even to making England like 
America. Fashion permits a lady to denude her neck and bosom, 
but it would be horrifying were she to expose her ankles ! — how 
much more elegaut she would appear if fashion would take 
about four inches from the bottom of the dress and sew it on the 
top. Even Eve w r as shamed when she saw her nakedness, — 
hence the fig leaf which so astonished Adam ! 

Claudius Caesar could not by royal decree, reverse the letter 
F in the Ptoman alphabet, nor can Kussia's Emperor reverse the 
Style; but fashion can make Englishmen like the Americans as 
much as England likes America's cotton. 

One short leg on a Queen introduced high heels on shoes ! 
One broken arm on a royal lady gave the mode to the pillow 
sleeves ! One straight jacket on a lunatic Princess gave the 
fashion of corsets ! Large feet on a Christian sovereign was the 
cause of long dresses ! The appearance of an imperial Prince 
introduced crinoline ! Verily fashion is all-powerful. 

England directly abolished slavery, while indirectly she encou- 
rages it. 



AT WHOSE DOOK DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 93 

" The pond that, when stirred, does muddy appear, 
Has mud at the bottom when still and clear." 

Lord Melbourne, one of the ministers, said, the night the 
Emancipation Bill was passed, if he could have had his own 
way, he would have let it alone. He knew that " relieving a 
man of his crutches would not cure the gout." 



Some Spanish proverb has said that — "To return evil for 
good is devilish ; to return good for good is human ; but to 
return good for evil is Godlike." Will the negrophobian take 
the hint ? 

I have read somewhere of a traveller in Devonshire, who wish- 
ing to rest his horse at an inn he saw in the distance, entered 
the lane, and after riding on for some time, was surprised to find 
himself no nearer, — he continued, however, but could but notice 
the sameness of the trees, the familiar look of the hedges as he 
trotted on ; the longer he rode the further appeared the inn. 
No one but himself was on the road, yet he saw the print of 
horses' feet. He examined more closely as the footmarks 
increased, and was astonished to find that the tracks were made 
by his own horse ! He had entered those famous lanes in 
Devonshire, which like the maze of Cardinal Wolsey at Hamp- 
ton Court, allured him continually over the same ground, always 
moving, but never meeting the goal. The Anti-Slavery party 
during my life-time have been on the same wild goose chase — 
always in a Maze — always in the Devonshire lanes — always 
crying wolf— but with eyes in the back of their heads— and ears 
ever closed — could neither see the true state of the case, nor 
listen to the voice of reason. The snow ball of abolition was 
no bigger than an apple when they commenced to roll it ; but 
now they cannot see over it — or through it— or around it. They 
are in a Maze. What is the use of having a minute hand on 
the clock, when the hour-hand is gone — or what is worse still — 
when there is no pendulum ? 



91 THE FACTS ; OK, 

" As an ape is the more hideous for its resemblance to a man, 
so is superstition for its resemblance to religion " — or false phi- 
lanthropy for its resemblance to true benevolence. 

The tendency of the human mind to exaggerate has been for- 
cibly shown on this slave question. 

"You are always talking of the rights of negroes," says 
Coleridge in his Table Talk, " As a rhetorical mode of stimu- 
lating the people here I do not object, but I utterly condemn 
your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the 
blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the 
state in which their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be 
thankful for the Providence which has placed them within the 
means of grace." 

Negro slavery is a civilizer; emancipate the cotton States and 
you drive the negro further south. Central America, Nicaragua 
and Mexico are yet to be civilized through the instrumentality 
of the negro. 

Always rowing against the flood — never thinking of the ebb 
— the abolitionists at last find their theoretical craft high and 
dry. 

Forgetting that mortification follows inflammation — and 
amputation succeeds mortification — they naturally feel disgusted 
to see themselves standing like a chicken on the snowbank, on 
one leg ! One grain of wheat in their quarter of chaff would 
be a relief ; but like the missionary in China and India, they are 
continually waiting, like Micawber, for something to turn up. 

The old proverb saith — " If each would sweep before his 
own door we should have a clean street." Be ye consistent ; 
look at home ; balance your own books. The emancipate-at- 
any-price party pass any number of appropriations in their aris- 
tocratic parliament, bat forget to vote for the mutiny bill. 

They remind me of the resolutions of the Irish committee : 

Resolved — That we have a new jail. 

Resolved — That the new jail be erected where the old jail now stands. 

Resolved — That the old jail be not removed till the new jail is built. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 95 

They are continually pouring water into a rat-hole. 

Jefferson's declaration clause contains the text for all their 
preachers. Here is a letter, at hand to-day, addressed to 
"Young* America," 

" As Thomas Jefferson once said on a certain occasion, that errors of 
opinion must be tolerated, whilst truth and reason are left to combat with 
it ;' so with regard to negro-slavery. It therefore becomes the duty of 
every lover of his country's honor to see to it, that the Jeffersonian prin- 
ciples should be the only tests by which intelligent philanthropists and 
Christians can discuss this question, so as to bring our beloved country 
(the United States) back to the fundamental principles of the Declaration 
of Independence, viz. : ' That all men are created equal ; that they are 
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among 
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Then, sir immediate 
and unconditional emancipation shall, as a sequence, become the rigid of 
the slave, and the duty of the master. 

" My ostensible object in writing you this note, is to propose to you the 
following questions for public discussion, time and place to be arranged 
hereafter : 

" Is the negro a man? If a man, should any invidious distinction exist, 
whether in Church or State, to divest him of social, civil, and religious 
liberty?" 

My memory furnishes me with a quotation or two from the 
same "Free and Equal statesman" — page 112, Tucker's Life of 
Jefferson—" That the elder son could have no claim, in reason, 
to twice as much as his brothers or sisters, unless he could eat 
twice as much, or do double work." He believed in all children 
of honest parents being " Free and Equal." He went further, 
and believed in all Churches being " Free and Equal," and initi- 
ated laws, and carried them in order to make them so. When 
visiting John Adams (the American Minister in London, in 
1786,) he was presented at Court, when George III. did not 
directly insult him, but treated him with great coolness. Wri- 
ting; home at that time, he said, " England's hatred is deep-rooted 
and cordial, and nothing is wanting with her but the power to 
wipe us and the land we live in out of existence. Again he says — 



96 THE FACTS ; OK, 

"American reputation in Europe is not such as to be flattering to its 
citizens. Two circumstances are particularly objected to us — the non-pay- 
ment of our debts, and the want of energy in our Government. They 
discourage a connection with us. I own it to be my opinion, that good 
will arise from the destruction of our credit. You observe he had also 
' Free and Equal ' views on financial affairs." 

His residence abroad seems to have given him " Free and 
Equal " opinions on European politics as well. Page 240, same 
author : 

" If all the Sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work to 
emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and 
prejudices, a thousand years will not place them on that high ground on 
which our common people are now setting out. Ours could nut have been 
so fairly placed under the control of the common sense of the people, had 
they not been separated from their parent Btock, and kept from contami- 
nation, either from one or the other people of the old world, by the inter- 
vention of so wide an ocean." 

Writing from France (page 282) just before the French 
Revolution, he said : 

" The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood 
of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.' 1 

Barere quoted the same idea a short time after in the French 
Assembly. 

Retiring from Washington's Cabinet at fifty-six, he played 
the usual game that statesmen understand so well when most 
desiring office, retiring from public life. Cincinnatus is the stock 
example for such disinterested parties. Jefferson in 1794 retired 
to Monticello, where he resolved " never to take another news- 
paper of any sort." Yet at the same time he was attacking 
Washington's administration as fiercely all the while as Lord 
John Russell is Lord Derby's, and for the same disinterested ob- 
ject. If the English abolitionists have not got enough of his 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 97 

" Free and Equal " creed, I will make one more extract, written 
in his retirement from all public turmoil. 

Speaking of the French, hoping.that they will triumph, he hints that the 
disgrace of defeat to the invading tyrants is destined, in the order of 
events, to kindle the wrath of the people of Europe against those who 
have dared to embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring, at length, 
kings, nobles, and priests to the scaffold — which they have been so long 
deluging with human blood. I am still warm when I think of these scoun- 
drels. 

What do the abolition nobility of England think of such "free 
and equal" sentiments as these ? 

Returning to my correspondent, who commenced by holding 
Jefferson over my head, and ended with asking me if I will dis- 
cuss, in some public place, these questions — " Is the negro a 
man ? If a man, should any invidious distinction exist, either in 
Church or State, to divest him of social, civil, and religious 
liberty ?" I beg to say, most decidedly, that I will not discuss 
said questions in public — except with the pen — but with that I 
think in these articles I have covered sufficient ground, and 
stated my points in such a manner as to bring any intellectually 
pugilistic abolitionists away from the tea-table into the ring — 
for from the first I have challenged refutation of my arguments 
as a matter of debate. 

Yes — the negro is a man — so is the Esquimaux — so is the 
Australian— so is the Patagonian — at least they have no tails. 

Observing an ourang-outang in a menagerie, one negro said 
to the other, " Sambo, dat surely are a nigger !" " No, dat isn't 
a nigger ; he look like nigger, but he isn't." " If dat war a nig- 
ger, he'd speke," responded Pompey. " Ah, yes," replied Sambo, 
" Dat's one of your cunnin' niggers — he no speke — 'cause when 
he speke, white man put hoe in his hand." 

This is no fiction. The slaves grow up like children — their 
minds do not develop with their bodies. 

Holmes says the negro's idea of luxury on a hot day is con- 



98 THE FACTS J OR, 

veyed by dividing a water-melon — feeding on the pulp — placing 
one half on his head and sitting down in the other ! 

The Honorable Miss Murray, speaking of the peculiarities of 
the negro character, says (page 3Q4), " Adeline, at Lynchburg, 
saw my sketch of the black cook on board the Links canal boat, 
at which she burst into a loud laugh, and exclaimed, ' He very 
like a monkey, missus — we very like monkeys \ m 

Yes, the negro is a man — but his race has always been in 
bondage, and will so continue till the negro shows self-reliance. 

Hannibal was not a negro, although I have heard an aboli- 
tionist claim him. " Who were your ancestors ?" some quid nunc 
asked the dark-featured Dumas: 

" My grandfather was a negro, my great great grandfather 
was an ape, my race commenced where yours left off," replied 
the witty novelist. 

The ants are not strong, yet prepare meat in summer — the 
locusts have no king, yet go forth in bands — the spider taketh 
hold with hands, and reacheth the king's palace — the beasts of 
the field often show more self-reliance than the negro — yet he 
is a man ; but a higher power than man has fastened upon him 
the badge of servitude — feeble humanity cannot explain these 
things. 

One of the most remarkable facts in the guide book of the 
Naturalist, is that this war of colony extends to insects. The 
white ants all the world over, writes Darwin, make slaves of 
black ants. They imprison them, and keep them in an abject 
state of serfdom. They are the barbers, waiters, slaves of the 
more intellectual white tribe. Observation at any ant-hill of the 
two species will corroborate this assertion. 

The Creator made an animal, and when finished created 
another to destroy it. This applies to birds, fishes and insects. 
The human race in nations are continually at war — each man 
against his neighbor. There is war and bloodshed between 
black and black in Negroland. There are tears and happiness 
between white and black on the American plantations. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 99 

" In every part of the universe," writes Archbishop Whately, 
" we see works of wise and benevolent design ; and yet we see, 
in many instances, apparent frustation of this design. We see 
the productiveness of the earth interrupted by unfavorble sea- 
sons, the structure of the animal frame enfeebled, and its func- 
tions impaired by disease, and vast multitudes of living beings 
exposed, from various causes, to suffering and to premature 
destruction. 

In the moral and political world, wars and civil discussion, 
tyrannical governments, unwise laws, and all evils of this class 
correspond to the inundations, the droughts, the tornadoes, and 
the earthquakes of the natural world. 

We cannot give a satisfactory account of either. We cannot, 
in short, explain the great difficulty, which, in proportion as we 
reflect attentively, we shall more and more perceive to be the 
only difficulty in theology, the existence of evil in the Universe. 

The negro is a man, but a serving-man. Thus far slavery has 
done them more good than freedom. Slavery in America is 
civilization. Freedom in Africa is barbarism. I have a case 
in point. 

Two emperors have recently given up the ghost — the one 
politically, the other mortally. Two great kings have departed 
— both were negroes ; both were once slaves ; both were black 
as the ace of spades. Both proved themselves men— save the 
bright side of human nature — for their vices, not virtues, were 
most prominent. Both these kings ruled many millions ; but 
misfortune has overtaken the one — death the other. 

The Duke of Marmalade and the Earl of Watermelon have 
engaged apartments for the fugitive Soulouque— late Emperor 
of Hayti — at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, in Paris ; and eight 
hundred negroes have been cut up, butchered, burnt, sacrificed 
over the dead body of Dahomey, the Slave King of negrolaud 1 

Yes, the negro is a man 1 and, while replying to the question, 
a few particulars of the life and death of one of the most pro- 
minent of that race, may prove the truth of what I have written 



100 THE FACTS ; OR, 

in these pages — that the African is sensual, brutal, indolent, 
savage, in his barbarian state, requiring the strong intellect and 
moral power of the white man to develop his power, and compel 
him to work out the destiny of his race — through American 
slavery, to Christian civilization. Straight is the road, narrow 
the way. " It was not the Romaus that spread upon the world, 
but the world that spread upon the Romans." It was iiot the 
Americans that spread upon the slaves, but the slaves that 
spread upon the Americans. 

Themistocles, the Athenian, when asked to play on the flute, 
said " he could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town 
into a great city." 

The abolition party can fiddle, but they cannot retard the 
progress of Christianizing savages ; nor can they make a great 
nation into a little colony. 

They aim at nothing, and always hit it. When they miss 
they fire again, and succeed in hitting it where they missed it 
before. 

Is a negro a man ? The " Daily News" of the 28th ult. de- 
voted a leader to the obituary of a distinguished negro — a rep- 
resentative man ! I cannot do better than to copy a part of it. 

" We have this morning to announce the death of a Sovereign. A 
black, woolly-headed potentate was he, it is true, but nevertheless a nota- 
ble Monarch — a trained and experienced warrior — a king whose deeds re- 
sounded far and wide. He had a court, a nobility, a treasury, an army, 
and a policy ; he had shed more blood than greater kings, and had ambi- 
tions of his own ; he raised his state to external importance, made treaties, 
concluded alliances, and brought himself within the vortex of European 
diplomacy. In his time, too, he had thwarted, by his conduct and mea- 
sures, the policy cf England, and incurred the displeasure of Lord 
Palmerston, who opposed his proceedings, threatened him with chastise- 
ment, resisted the extension of his dominions, and supplied the smaller 
communities, whose independence was assailed, with arms and munitions 
of war. Latterly he became an object of attraction to France. Louis 
Napoleon sought his friendship and commercial intercourse, sent a mission 
to his capital, and presented him with brass field-pieces wherewith to 
astonish his subjects. English travellers, functionaries, and naval officers, 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 101 

too, visited him, were hospitably entertained, despite international differ- 
ences, and, returning, after fruitless discussions, from his Court, published 
narratives of his dreadful deeds, that have given him a world-wide name, 
and enrolled him amongst the monsters of humanity. It is the demise of 
Gezo, the Slave King of Dahomey, that we record. The exact date when 
the event occurred is not given in the letters before us, but the news is 
brought with such particulars, by the last mail from the West Coast of 
Africa, that no doubt can be entertained that Gezo is gathered to his 
fathers, and that his son reigns in his stead." 

Some think facts are appearances — that appearances are delu- 
sions — that a man of fact is a man of fiction ; — no matter — is a 
negro a man? asks my informant. Yes — Dahomey was a 
negro — or rather Gezo is his name. He was a negro, and to 
show how much of a man he was, I again take the scissors : 

" Gezo deserved the odium and detestation which he so abundantly 
obtained ; all the more, that he was both able and sagacious. For 
upward of five and twenty years he supplied all the demands of the Span- 
ish and Portuguese slave dealers who infested the Bight of Benin, ravaging 
and devastating the interior far and wide by his slave hunts to obtain 
victims for his European customers. lie organized and led these internal 
forays and cruelties on the largest scale Africa has known, and annually 
sold without remorse or scruple his own countrymen in tens of thousands 
for exportation. His horrible cruelties arrested the progress of Africa, 
fed the wretchedness and mortality of the Middle Passage, and by depo- 
pulating Negroland, promoted the immense material prosperity of Cuba and 
Brazil. His policy, and the wealth he derived from it, excited the cupidity 
of his neighbors, and from Whydah to Lagos, the Slave Trade became the 
business of the whole population. When Gezo succeeded to his patrimo- 
nial throne, the adjacent country was inhabited by independent communi- 
ties of the Egbas, and it was on them he perpetrated his earlier atrocities. 
He attacked them, burnt their towns, carried off their choicest people, 
and when his own violence was unsuccessful, his intrigue introduced civil 
war, which completed their ruin." 

Was it not this king's father that wrote that famous letter to 
George the Third ? saying he had fought two huudred and nine 
battles ; that the paths before his home were paved with the 
heads of his enemies ; that a kind frise work of soldiers' sculls 
was arrayed about his (mud) palace walls ! 



102 THE FACTS ; OE, 

In 1*722, Mr. Norris was in that country, and states that jaw- 
bones and negro skulls were the favorite ornaments of the altars. 

" Civilized America" is a paradise in comparison. There a 
negro is a man — a better man than Gezo. 

As boys cruelly fagged at Eton become the cruellest of fag- 
gers, so does a liberated slave make the most merciless of 
masters. Temperance in prosperity, and fortitude in adversity, 
are not the negro's virtues. Nakedness is as uncouthly in mind 
as in body. America is the only country ever colonized by free- 
dom, or without the sword — yet Miles Standish, the lover of the 
Puritan maiden, Priscilla, was a man of war ; and the Pilgrim 
Fathers proved themselves as great tyrants as Laud and his 
abettors, when they kicked Roger Williams out of their hacienda. 

I was surprised to see on the tomb-stones of Lombardy, that 
the early Italian governors were called " Tormentors! 1 The 
abolitionists should be similarly styled. 

See what the American missionary, Bower, has to say, and his 
authority is recent, about negroes at home : 

" I have counted the sites of eighteen desolated towns within a distance 
of sixty miles between Badagry and Abeokuto — the legitimate result 
of the slave trade. The whole Yoruba country is full of depopulated 
towns, some of which were even larger than Abeokuta is at present. Of 
all the places visited by the Landers, only Ishukki, Izbobo, Ikishi, and a 
few villages remain. Ijenna was destroyed a few weeks after my arrival 
in the country. Other and still larger towns have lately fallen. At one 
of these, called Oke-Oddan, the Dahomey army killed or captured 
20,000 people, on which occasion the King presented Domingo, the 
slaver, with 600 slaves. The whole number of people destroyed in this 
section of country within the last fifty years cannot be less than 500,000 !" 

Look at that African butchery. Then look at American 
slavery. 

Sterne's negro girl did not learn mercy till she had suffered 
oppression. Precious odors may be most fragrant when most 
crushed ; but American negroes do not bear a similar anomaly. 
The negrophobists delight in exaggerating the sins of the Ameri- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 103 

cans ; but bow seldom they moralize on African cruelty ! So goes 
the world. Job's afflictions and trials are much more vividly 
painted than Solomon's felicities. Prosperity in the Old Testa- 
ment was a blessing — so was adversity in the New. 

Gezo was a negro. Is a negro a man ? Take another extract 
from the " Daily News." 

" While, however, the interior without the limits of Dahomey suffered by 
these slave wars, disorganization and anarchy, the towns on the coast for 
a season flourished. Whydah, Porto-Novo, Badagry, and Lagos rose in 
population, carried on a great commerce in human flesh, were the seats of 
large establishments, and grew rapidly in wealth. But their ill-gotten 
riches and factitious prosperity brought about their own ruin ; they were 
nests and dens of robbers, thieves, and pirates: scenes of tumult, disorder, 
and violence, were of constant occurrence. Badagry, which boasted of 
10,000 inhabitants, was burnt down in a cut-throat affair amongst its own 
lawless population ; the whole Bight was closely blockaded by English 
cruisers ; and Lagos was destroyed by a British bombardment. The libe- 
rated Africans of Sierra Leone founded the town of Abeokuta, established 
in the interior an anti-slave trade interest, were encouraged by English 
missionaries, and supported by English assistance. This brought on Abeo- 
kuta the wrath of Gezo ; again and again he attacked the new community, 
as often his assaults and sieges were repulsed ; until at last, in 1851, the 
Slave King was completely routed under its mud walls, and from that time 
his powers declined. British policy prevailed on the coast ; Lagos, under 
the influence of our consuls, Beecroft and Campbell (both remarkable 
men), became the seat of a large and profitable lawful commerce; roads 
were opened up into the interior ; peace being established, industry took to 
honest courses ; and from Whydah to Lagos the commerce in palm super- 
seded the slave trade, and increased at a rate nothing less than marvel- 
lous, and even Gezo sought, however grimly, to regain his diminished 
revenues by participating in it. 

" Gezo was, however, never converted or reconciled to legitimate com- 
merce ; he repulsed all our diplomatic advances, rejected an anti-slave 
treaty, denounced our cruising system, complained that we had deprived 
him of his revenues, and was ever on the alert to revive the traffic. Thus 
disposed, he at onec responded to the French scheme of emigration ; and 
gladly received at Abomi a French mission. But the French prices for 
negroes were too low to yield him a profit, and althought the slave trade 
was partially revived, to the serious injury of lawful commerce, he had no 
large operations with the French ; he preferred the greater liberality of 



104 THE FACTS J OK, 

his old friends and connections — the Spanish and Portuguese dealers in 
men." 

Two thousand negroes were to have been slaughtered at the fune- 
ral ; but slaves were too high — only eight hundred were massacred ! 
more than ever suffered death for crime in America during half 
a ceutury — and yet hear the groans of the negrophobist over 
American slavery ! It is ignoble — it is disgraceful — for leading 
statesmen to look at America with jaundiced eyes, and pass 
Africa by. No wonder Americans are disgusted. The details 
of the Slave King's death may convince those who doubt that a 
negro is a man ! The Representative Negro is dead. 

"At last his dismal reign is over ; and his death has been mourned and 
his funeral celebrated by the entire slave trade interest of the coast and 
the interior. His obsequies were performed at Abomi ; all the slave 
traders at Whydah attended and assisted at them ; each carried thither 
his contribution to his memory, and of merchandise to be presented to his 
successor. It had been proposed to facilitate Gezo's admission into the 
other world by the slaughter of 2,000 Africans, but, whether from the diffi- 
culty of procuring that number, or from their greatly increased value to 
the Spaniards, the massacre was happily limited to 800. Gezo's European 
agent at Whydah as usual displayed his magnificence on the occasion. He 
offered to the new Sovereign a large silver salver filled with bright new 
dollars, and he provided for the enjoyment of his old master in the Para- 
dise, whither he is supposed to have betaken himself, the model of an oak 
tree in frosted silver, from the branches of which hung, when disposed to 
the fragrant weed, the choicest of Havana cigars. The mournful and 
terrible ceremonies over, the new King proclaimed his policy to be that of 
his father ; report adds that he at once left Abomi at the head of a large 
army on a slave-hunting expedition." 

The slave trade is in full blast again, but I trust the American 
people will shut the gate against the fearful pestilence. We 
have already too many negroes in America. We want no more. 
We prefer white men. We are fastidious. As England prefers 
black people, I hereby, on behalf of America, beg to propose 
that the two countries make an exchange. England has millions 
of poor white people which she does not consider worth even a 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 105 

vote. America values these men, and proposes, by way of 

experiment, to exchange American slaves for English freemen 

miners, farmers, operatives. Commence with five hundred thou- 
sand — exchange man for man — each to be free, but bound to 
work by Parliamentary and Congressional Acts. Make it an 
opposition system. Perhaps the white men will work just as 
well in the cotton field. Perhaps the black men will like the 
English sun better than the American. 

The "Daily News 7 ' thinks slavery is in full blast again : 

" The truth is, that, consequent on the policy and proceedings of France, 
the improvement and growing importance of this part of the coast are now 
seriously endangered. At Whydah large preparations are being made to 
revive the traffic; the roads into the interior are again interrupted; the 
amount of palm oil brought down for exportation has in the last twelve 
months fallen off considerably ; the tranquillity and prosperity of Abeokuta 
have been disturbed ; and Kosoko, the deposed King of Lagos, is making 
preparations, if not to recover, at least to destroy, his former capital. At 
this conjuncture of alarm and danger, the Admiralty has committed one 
of its perverse and unaccountable mistakes by ordering the Commodore to 
withdraw from before Lagos the gunboat which has for some time past 
afforded efficient protection to that place and its rising commerce ; and 
unless the Commodore and the Consul, with a better knowledge of the 
necessities of the case than Sir John Pakington seems to possess, take upon 
themselves the responsibility of disobeying this order, in a month or two 
we shall probably hear of the destruction of Lagos, the massacre of the 
European soldiers and missionaries, and the complete restoration of the 
slave trade along the Bight of Benin." 



" Slavery in the United States," wrote a distinguished divine, 
" is like a rising tide, always on the increase." 

Emancipation would cure the disease by killing the patient. 
It is not so difficult to dam a stream, as to prevent an overflow 
in the course of time. Decision without inquiry, is no better 
than inquiry without decision. 

" He that is truly wise and great, 
Lives both too early and too late." 



106 THE FACTS ; OK, 

I was much amused, when in Calcutta, by hearing an officer 
of the Indian army relating some of his experience during the 
celebrated Affghau campaign. When stealthily approaching 
the enemy's camp, it was found necessary to prevent the donkeys 
from braying, which was effectually done by tying large stones 
to their tails. Those sober, benevolent animals, for want of 
their proper purchase, became mute, and behaved as they should 
do. I wish some similar invention could be discovered for the 
Uncle Tom party. 

Algiers and Tunis were bombarded before the Algerine pirates 
gave up their Mediterranean haunts — the right of search was a 
failure. 

The Musquito fleet, just before Emancipation Days, had to be 
destroyed before Spain would enforce her treaties on the coast. 
So if England takes a decided stand now with Spain in assisting 
America in purchasing Cuba by fair bargain, she will not only 
do a good thing for herself by getting paid her Spanish claims, 
but she will befriend the Spanish government, stop the slave- 
trade, and may save a revolution by making free States of Mis- 
souri, Kentucky, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland. 

When Cuba goes back to America, from whence, to use Sena- 
tor Seward's simile, she was washed away by the Mississippi, sand 
by sand — as gravitation will compel her to return from whence 
she sprung — the northern slave States must become free. 

Free labor is a powerful emancipator, and white men can 
work in these States, but could not live under the sun of their 
more southerly countries.. Germans are even now growing 
cotton in Texas, to come here. 

Three centuries ago there were no slaves — no serfs in Russia 
— no attachment of peasants to the soil before 1593 — but it was 
a century later, when the Asiento Treaty left the stain on Eng- 
land, which " Young Africa," in his able defence, failed to write 
out. Like Copperfield, trying to sleep with one eye open — it 
cannot be done ! "Young Africa" defends England by trans- 
ferring a part of the crime to Spain, Holland, Portugal, aud 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 107 

France. Very well. Divide it among you, if you like, but donH 
put it off on America ! 

From 1680 to 1100, 300,000 negroes were taken from Africa 
to America — fifteen thousand per year. Las Casas's sympathy 
for the Indian substituted African slavery. It is estimated by 
the Abbe Raynal and Cocker that, to obtain the present stock 
in the West, some 10,000,000 have been exported from Africa, 
and to get this 10,000,000 to the coast, some 180,000,000 of 
Africans must have perished to satiate European avarice during 
the past four hundred years ! 

When we remember that one in ten perishes in war, one in 
five dies on the passage ! and one in three in getting acclimated! 
we can better understand the magnitude of the statement. 

The author of " Twenty Years on Board a Slaver," writes, 
page 86 : 

" It would be a task of many pages if I attempted to give a full account 
of the origin and causes of slavery in Africa. As a national institution, it 
seems to have existed always. Africans have been bondsmen everywhere, 
and the oldest monuments bear their images linked with menial toils and 
absolute servitude. Still I have no hesitation in saying that three-fourths 
of the slaves sent abroad from Africa are the fruits of native wars, fomented 
by the avarice and temptation of our own race. I cannot exculpate any 
commercial nation from this sweeping censure. We stimulate the negro 
passions by the introduction of wants and fancies never dreamed of by the 
simple natives, while slavery was an institution of domestic need and com- 
fort alone. But what was once a luxury has now ripened into an absolute 
necessity ; so that man, in truth, has become the coin of Africa, and the 
' legal tender ' of a brutal trade." 

Aside from the traffic in human beings, what a splendid trade 
England has had in fitting out and trimming all these slavers ! 

I am told that Manchester, and Birmingham, and Liverpool 
still have the monopoly. Is Exeter-hall aware that the provi- 
sions, the fittings, the supplies for the Spanish traders of our 
time, mostly are furnished by anti-slavery England ? 

Albert Smith says even the idols are made m Birmingham I 



108 



THE FACTS J OK, 



Captain Carnot drives the nail straight borne. Read him 
(page 86): 

" England to-day, with all her philanthropy, sends under the cross of St. 
George, to convenient magazines of lawful commerce on the coast, her 
Birmingham muskets, Manchester cottons, and Liverpool lead, all of which 
are righteously swapped at Sierra Leone, Acra, and on the Gold Coast, for 
Spanish or Brazilian bills on London. Yet what British merchant does 
not know the traffic on which these bills are founded, and for whose sup- 
port the wares are purchased ? France, with her bonnet rouge and frater- 
nity, dispatches her Rouen cottons, Marseilles brandies, flimsy taffetas and 
indescribable variety of tinsel gewgaws. Philosophic Germany demands a 
slice for her looking-glasses and beads; while multitudes of our own 
worthy traders, who would hang a slaver as a pirate when caught, do not 
hesitate to supply him indirectly with tobacco, powder, cotton, Vanke* 
rum, and New England notions, in order to bait the trap in which he may 
be caught! It is (he temptation of these things, I repeat,' that feeds the 
slave-making ware of Africa, and forms the human basis of those admirable 
bills of exchange." 

What America asks is consistency. That Englishmen should 
not require to be led by those who have thought upon one theme 
so long, it has become a slavomania. Let their preachers prac- 
tise what they preach— Charity begins at home. 

Why is it that thousands of people in Great Britain think au 
American a black man ? 

Why is it that hundreds of thousands in this country are 
astonished that Americans speak such good English ? 

Sometimes the further you extend the circle of light, the wider 
you make the horizon of darkness. The most mora! may become 
the most debased, so England's kindest intentions may inflict 
the most injury. 

The good intentions of our friends often do more damage than 
the worst actions of our enemies. 

You can inflict pain to do a greater good— as a surgeon may 
amputate a limb to save life— or as you may punish a child. If 
you give poison to a man with the intention of killing him, and 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 109 

it cures him of some disease, the act was as bad as the result 
was good. 

If you give medicine to heal and it kills, you are as innocent 
in that case as you were guilty in the other. 

Therefore the English, who carried on the slave trade and 
practised such horrible cruelties, were guilty of the crime, But 
if enslaving has benefited a race, the act is as good as the motive 
was bad. 

Does not slavery really anticipate the benefits of civilization, 
and retard the vices of civilization ? 

" He that acts in all things openly does not deceive the less, 
for most persons either do not understand him or do not believe 
him." 



Why is it that our laws — our institutions — our habits — our 
life is not better understood by the masses, and more fairly 
represented by the Thomas Colley Grattans of the age ? Simply 
on account of thirty years' of anti-slavery bias. 

A nation has looked through a few eyes already too long — a 
few leaders cannot much longer deceive the people. There are 
many who believe that had not England made the blunder of 
abolishing slavery — America would to-day be her bosom compa- 
nion. Free trade would have made an alliance as binding as 
the law of language and morality, and I hope yet to see the day 
when America may receive a fair trial on this side of the water. 
It is useless to talk about the good feeling when the bad oozes 
out on every turn. Children grow up, as their parents did 
before them, with some Legree-tortuv'mg slave picture always in 
their mind when they meet an American ! They are always 
looking for chains and manacles, whips, and mangled Uncle Toms. 

Americans do not judge of the House of Commons by such 
men as Sadlier or Brown. Why should Englishmen judge of the 
American Congress by such representatives as Mr. Brooks ? 
How many can give the names of our Congressmen. 



110 THE FACTS ; OK, 

The American people should not be judged and committed on 
the record of the police court ! 

Let me ask the Uucle Tom party a few questions : Do they 
not think that as their philanthropic cats and dogs have been so 
successful in their hunting after philanthropic rats and mice — 
that it would be a change to give a little attention to the nobler 
game of lions and buffaloes ? Is not a white man in Manchester 
more worthy of thought than a black man in America ? 

Are they aware that the sole ambition of a freed slave is to 
own a slave. Nero loved his harp — Domitian his bow and 
arrows — Comraodus his foils — Caracalla his chariot — but your 
real negro loves nothing so well as to own another negro. Like 
master, like man. Do they know that their closest philanthropy 
for the ebony race has done more to postpone emancipation than 
any other action ? 

Can they find on the face of the globe the lower eighth of the 
population of any country living so happily and contentedly as 
the slaves of the West ? Are there four millions of people bet- 
ter taken care of in any land ? 

Europe sleeps on loaded canon. Standing armies wait at all 
the gates. Look at the sentinels at all the palaces — and when 
you wish to move from state to state you must buy a passport. 

Did not the records of the House of Commons prove that the 
President of the Liberian Republic received 1,565 dollars for 
400 negroes on board the Regina Ccelia ? Has emancipation 
worked well in Spanish America — in the French West Indies — 
in the British possessions ? Have not civilization, morality, 
agriculture, and Christianity, declined under the withering 
influence of abolitionists ? Do they not think that, while sixty 
thousand ministers are preachiug the doctrines of our Saviour — 
love — sixty millions of Saxons are practising the doctrine of 
Moses— force ? Is there in reality so wide a difference between 
the American slaves and the slave-owners, as there is between 
the English aristocracy and the people ? 

Let the Exeter Hall reformers reflect. Let them remember 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? Ill 

that under the primogeniture law, which Mr. Locke King is 
trying to change, England entailed slavery upon America, her 
eldest son ! 

The negroes did not make the American Constitution. Wash- 
ington was an officer in the British army, Jefferson — Adams — 
Hancock — were British subjects. All men are not born " free 
and equal." I deny it. The Creator's plans cannot be thwarted 
by a turn of words in the nation's declaration of indepen- 
dence. 

Jefferson may have intended to say that all white men were 
born free and equal ; but if he did he was wrong, because they 
are not — all are different — no two things are alike — no drop in 
ocean — leaf in forest — sand in mountain — fish in sea — flower in 
garden. How then can races be the same ? Each land has its 
fauna, its flora and its humanity. This has been so in all ages. 
The Arab, the Egyptian, the Negro, are as distinctly chiselled in 
the monuments forty centuries ago as are the wild-dog, the grey- 
hound and the turnspit ! The type never dies 1 



I really did not intend to extend this article to its present 
length ; but, as I wrote, the subject widened, and I could not 
well curtail it. 

I have received more letters — some censure — some praise — 
one man says cut it short, another, classify your facts better, a 
third does not see any force in my argument ; then, as usual, 
comes advice as to how such things should be written. What 
object have you ? What good do you accomplish, etc. 

To-day I find this on my table : " I enjoy all you say in the 
1 Times.' It nourishes me. I am improving daily. One fault 
only— a little too epigrammatic— too true— too many thundering, 
overwhelming truths crowded into one nut-shell. Had you not 
better fill up with lighter matter now and then, and not choke 
off all opposition with so much energy ?" I begin to feel encou- 



112 THE FACTS ; OK, 

raged at this, when another friend, an assistant secretary of an 
American Legation, writes me in the strictest confidence — "your 
articles in the ' Northern Times ' on slavery are the worst things 
you have ever written — bad grammar — bad punctuation — bad 
spelling," etc. I ask him if that is mine or the printer's fault — 
and if a few able-bodied ideas are not scattered along the 
papers ? 

It is always so — your strong points are passed over — your 
weak ones stand boldly out. 

One friend advised me not to kick against the pricks ; adding 
that treacle catches more flies than vinegar. Exactly — but the 
truth is, I am not ambitious to catch Jiies, when more respectable 
game is on the move. 

" You must not consider that all Englishmen are stamped and 
labled Exeter Hall," writes another. Of course not ! I re- 
spond ; but the few abolition leaders were high in rank, and 
millions followed them without reflection. 

The " Times" of Friday last, reports the debate on the West 
Indian Bill. 

Buxton said that it was the fall in sugar, not emancipation, 
that destroyed the West Indies. 

How happens it that the same analogy did not apply to the 
Spanish colonies ? 

Jamaica, said Labouchere, used to send to Great Britain 
1,500,000 cwt. of sugar, now she sends not quite 500,000 cwt. 

Bulwer gave some interesting facts. Coolie immigration to 
Mauritius commenced in 1836, suspended in 1838, and Govern- 
ment took it up in 1843 ; since which 170,000 have been intro- 
duced. The sugar crop decreasing in consequence, from 
10,000,000 lbs. to 238,480 lbs. In British Guinea 23,000 
Coolies were imported; augmenting the crop from 34,000 hhds., 
in 1841, to 55,361 hhds., iu 1855. Trinidad was equally pro- 
gressive ; only 10,000 being taken to Jamaica. The debate 
decidedly favored Coolie emigration ; Chinese — Hindoos — but 
not Negroes. Bulwer was equal to Asiatic slavery — so was 



AT WHOSE DOOE DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 113 

Buxton — so Labouchere — so Crossly — so Fortescue — but these 
statesmen cannot quite swallow African slavery. The yellow 
boys as Coolies; but not the blacks as slaves ! Yet the African 
is Salamander proof in the cane-brake; while the poor Asiatic 
shortens his days. No matter — let them die — so long as the 
Negro lives ! 

Bulwer was eloquent when snubbing the apostles of " Uncle 
Tom. He admits the evil, and asks Mr. Buxton "What he will 
do with it ?" Read his peroration : 

" Let me say, in conclusion, a few words to the friends of the Anti- 
Slavery Society. I have fought by their side in my youth, and now, when 
I think they have been misinformed, I still believe that our object is the 
same — namely, to give complete success to the sublime experiment of 
negro emancipation. It becomes them above all men to do their best to 
render prosperous the colonies in which slavery has been abolished. 
Every hundred weight of sugar produced by the immigrant at Jamaica is 
a hundred weight withdrawn from the market of Cuban slaves. Will slave 
states follow our example unless capital nourish under it ? Can capital 
nourish unless it has the right to hire labor wherever labor is willing to 
be hired ? I warn them, that if by any indiscretion of over zeal on our 
part our West India Colony becomes injured, it is we who shall rivet the 
bonds of negro slavery wherever it yet desecrates a corner of the earth." 

" Slavery curses the white man, and blesses the slave 1" 
There is many a southern planter that will indorse that view 
— but he dare not. It is more difficult to emancipate the whites 
than the blacks. They swear by the institution as they would 
by their bales of cotton. In reality, there is much difference of 
opinion in the slave States ; but knowing that association is their 
strength, good representatives are obliged to indorse the bad — 
a division in the camp creates disaster — the South speaks as one 
man. 

The cowardly act of striking below the belt— the treacherous 
strangulation of the Indian Thug — the Mormon Danite thrust — 
were no more ignoble, no more unmanly, not half so disgraceful, 
as that brutal assault of a southern representative upon a north- 



114 

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ku ■ : : leaned tiie inTraes* of rrsiewUxm. We mar deeply 

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AT DOOE DOES H - UB I 115 

ndition of her poorer classes — to the wretched retires 
I r. I 

one for tic tbe. Let the problem work. 
ier field- 
too much to ask of England not to bwy our slaTe-grown 
cotton, or sugar, or tobacco. 

too macb to ask her for money to purchase emancipa- 
tion . It is too much to expect her to break up any of her 
charities, or lessen her philai.: ipj. 

a portion of her tim: sl America will ke^p — Ike sJares 

will not ran away. In i ~ _3Boii5, in 1900 

twen: :;eriment. If it does not 

work — it the .land can get _rr porcopine 

quills ready to throw — bat meanwhile, let her 

_ in the sai. 
ire — no: fa e proper thing for drawing water. 

Iron will not float — neiii^r can England America to 

throw four hundred mil 
The abolitionists have been for : ::: 

- " X_f 

blacks are a . but a bad-sn . — 

- ■ ' - - . ' 

i i only four muV 

1::ls ;: i:. =. : :~ri: :: r~l_ — z.~. ~ '::- 

-six : 

During the ten yi hair is growing to raise the 

two millic l _ fund, and England is poshing her blne-piD- 

:ans, some abolition 

man v ; : II .nd by 

the ropes, i poleon 

r, and each 
■eh - 

I 

. - _ : - 



116 THE FACTS I OR 



Men of science have come to the conclusion that inulattoes 
would soon die out, if not replenished by black or white 
renewals. 

Catherine de Medicis used to amuse herself and courtiers by 
marrying dwarfs, but they never gave birth to children. Nature 
abhors abortions, and never commits a crime in propagating 
them. Giants are deficient in intellect — impotent, short-lived, 
and feeble in body. 

No black man would marry a black woman if he could get a 
white one. Even a shade of lightness they are grateful for. 

Blacks ascend the scale, while whites desceud by intermarry- 
ing ; the elevation of the one is the debasement of the other. 



Americans are weary of being misrepresented, and ask the 
Uncle Tom party, as a special favor, to leave them alone for the 
above time. 

Sensible Englishman have similar opinions, but there are a 
few, in high places, who continue to delude the masses They 
forget that a sparrow in hand is worth two vultures on the 
wing. The fable of the dog, who lost his mutton by biting at 
the shadow, is instructive. While the abolition party are catch- 
ing flies, the hornets escape. The difference between the Ameri- 
can slave and the Blase ncgrophobist is, that one works to get 
meat for his stomach, the other to get stomach for his meat. 
An argus on American slavery, but a mole on English poverty. 

It is not safe to put reynard on the jury in a poultry trial. 
The Emancipation Bill was ushered in with elaborate dinners, 
hot suppers, nice tea parties, and mutual admiration committees, 
but that day is passed. Buxton endeavors to prove that the 
West Indies still flourish, but gives no credit to free immigra- 
tion. 

You ask me why I defend the slave-owner, as I would not 
hold slaves myself ? Because he has been most unjustly abused 
— because he has been most maliciously misrepresented. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 117 

The slave-owner lias as much right to enter the northern 
States and demand them to admit slavery, as the northern 
abolitionists have to go South and enforce its abolition. 

I don't believe in such apples of gold in pictures of silver sen- 
timents. 

Slavery or civil war say you ? I answer promptly Slavery; 
the frying pan is better than the fire. There is one thing, how- 
ver, that I wish Europeans would understand, and that is 

First, that all Americans are not slaves or slave-owners. 

Second, that the 350,000 slave-owners of the United States 
do not represent the 26,000,000 of white men who never owned 
a slave. 

Third. That South Carolina and Virginia do not compose all 
the States of the American Union. 

The American slaves are not imprisoned for debt. The 
American slaves are not forced into the army to be shot down, 
as the general may dictate The American slaves have never 
been known to starve on the plantations. The American slaves 
never die for want of medical aid. The American slaves spend 
more money, and throw up more fire-works on the Fourth of 
July than their white owners. The American slaves had en- 
gaged every carriage at the livery stable one holiday in Louis- 
ville, Kentucky, some few years ago, preventing me from my 
drive in the country. The American slaves dress better than 
the English colliers, or miners, or farmers, or operatives. The 
American slaves show more affection for their masters than the 
aforesaid for their employers. 

The American slaves are seldom seen in the poor-houses, pau- 
per institutions, or prisons. The American slaves go to church 
on the Sabbath, and number more members of the Baptist and 
Episcopal church, than the white dwellers among them. The 
American slaves never know the wants of famine or of war. 
The American slaves consider themselves the aristocracy of the 
negro race. The American slaves have a voice in the election 



118 THE FACTS ; OR, 

of the Government — three votes out of five — that is, he is recog- 
nized to be three fifths of a man, while the millions in England 
that do not vote, do not take part in the elections — appear tc 
be of no account whatever — a Chiltern Hundreds constituency. 

The American slaves show more hale and hearty old men 
among their numbers than any other class. 

The American slaves are fond of shooting, and kill much of 
the game for the southern markets — the profits of which they 
are allowed to retain— while the poor laboring man in England, 
who squeezes out his ten shillings a week to support holf-a- 
dozen children, renders himself liable to transportation or impri- 
sonment by shooting a pheasant or a hare ! 

The American slaves ride in the same carriages with their 
masters and mistresses — while the free negroes are requested to 
keep at a respectable distance. 

I abhor the institution of slavery, but it seems to suit the 
temperament of the American slaves. 

I am contented to leave the question of slavery where Wash- 
ington left it, and Adams, and Jefferson. I am satisfied to 
sail in the same boat on that question with thirteen presidents, 
thirteen cabinets, thirteen administrations. I am willing to 
leave it where the Constitution left it, namely— a local question, 
a question entirely within the control of the sovereign States — a 
purely local, not a national question ; and those who try to fasten 
it on the nation, on the natioual standard, are disunionists and 
traitors in the land. Force is not a word for the administration 
to use against a sovereign state — unless that State attempts with- 
drawal — then use the Jacksonian argument. 

The American Union is not a powder magazine to be touched 
off with a South Carolina lucifer ! Xature may have ordained 
that everything shall be an enemy to every other thing — but 
these sovereign States must be an exception. 

Mr. Whitby says that the Roman Catholics on the purgatory 
question are right in their creed but wrong in their geography. 

The Carolinians are right at heart but wrong in the head ; a 



AT WHOSE DOOK DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 119 

spark may burn a city, a mole may inundate a province, a 
French rumor of invasion galvanize England with fear ; but 
proud, noble, little Carolina should remember her size be- 
before she attempts to break up our brotherhood of nations I 

No cripples, no crutches, no mutilated black men meet you in 
the southern cities, for there are few deformed, few ill-shaped 
beings in the slave ranks. They are born, they live, they die, 
they eat, they drink, they sleep, and enjoy the sweets of labor. 

The American slaves are advancing ; their masters are reced- 
ing. 

Want brings thrift ; thrift, plenty ; plenty, wealth ; wealth, 
luxury ; luxury, idleness, ruin and decay. Such is the march of 
events in the southern States. 

The slave-owners will wake up from their lethargy when the 
abolitionists leave them to themselves — not before. Continual 
fault-finding, continual recrimination, does not engender love or 
friendship. The bow long bent waxeth weak. The sympathies 
become thus destroyed and parties become geographical. 

Let the North mind its own affairs. Let England look at 
home. The South is fully twenty-one years of age. 



Two years before the Emancipation Bill passed, the historian 
Alison said, " Slavery is not only not an evil but a positive advan- 
tage, and a necessary step in the progress of improvement in the 
early ages of mankind." Survey the globe in ancient and 
modern times and you will find slavery coexisted with the 
human race, and continuing, though with mitigated features, 
through all the glories of ancieut civilization. 

The ages of Pericles and Antony, of Cicero and Socrates, of 
Fabricius and Justinian, were equally distinguished by the univer- 
sality of this distinction among the laboring classes. Twenty 
thousand freemen in Athens gave law to four hundred thousand 
slaves. For a thousand years, slavery was universal in Europe, 
and it still remains in some of the most extensive of its monar- 



120 THE FACTS ; OR, 

chies. Why, if immediate and unconditional emancipation from 
servitude was intended to follow the Christian religion, did it sub- 
mit to unmitigated slavery for fifteen hundred years after the 
introduction of that faith ? 

Five years after the passing of the African Act, Alison again 
took up the quesion in " Blackwood's Magazine." 

The apprentice term had expired. The falling off in com- 
merce and morality was poorer, yet Buxton gloried over what 
Alison pronounced with figures of arithmetic, as well as logic, 
was a miserable failure. I think it was the "Quarterly Review" 
that advised, in concluding an article on the life of Buxton, that 
his statue be put up immediately, else it would not witness in 
time the fall of England's colonial empire. 

Speaking of the "absurd and delusive principle" of the act 
which demonstrated that five years were sufficient to clothe the 
class with the habits and desires of freemen, and render the 
transition from servitude to liberty as safe and salutary, he says : 
" It may safely be affirmed that five hundred years would have 
been little enough for the momentous chauge. How long did it 
take to wear out slavery in the British Islands ? Five centuries. 
Why was it never found possible to extirpate it, even amidst all 
the refinements and civilization of Greece and Rome '( Why 
does it still exist, in undiminished vigor, over two-thirds of the 
globe ? Evidently because, it is a necessary step in the progress 
of civilization — because, without it, savage man never has 
worked, and never will work — because, without its coercion, the 
human race would be chained forever to the hunter or shepherd 
state — because, but for the slavery of our Saxcn progenitors, we 
would now have been wandering in the woods — because, what- 
ever evil may be attendent on servitude — and they are many and 
grievous — they are trivial in comparison to the universal and 
wider-spread penury, the total stoppage of the advance and pros- 
pects of the human race, which instantly follows the cursing of 
uncivilized man with the nominal blessing, the real destitution 
of freedom." 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 121 

Alison indignantly records, in 1839, " that the slave trade 
had been doubled in extent and quadrupled in horror, 
throughout the globe, by the, monstrous act ; and the sufferings of 
the African race, under European cupidity, are now incompara- 
bly greater than when the philanthropy of Wilberforce and 
Clarkson first interposed for their relief." 

Buxton himself estimates that one hundred and fifty thousand 
negroes were transported from African ports to the West Indies 
and the Brazils the very year the 800,000 slaves in the British 
Colonies were made freemen. The bill passed the Commons on 
the Tth, the Lords on the 19th, and received the royal assent 
on the 28th of August, 1833, but did not go into effect till the 
1st of August, 1834. 

Buxton estimated the annual Brazilian import alone was 
100,000— and gives figures to prove that 18,331 were landed at 
five ports in Brazil in the year ending 1st July, 1830. Sir Wil- 
liam Gore Ouseley, in 1835, and another official on the spot as 
late as 1840, testified that the trade had been, and continued to 
be, largely on the increase. Buxton put down 60,000 per 
annum to Cuba — and taking Porto Eico, etc., he estimated the 
annual import at 150,000. Captain M'Lean, Governor of Cape 
Coast Castle, testified to 140,000 having been carried off from 
the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1834. 

Four pounds value of Brazilian tobacco in rolls, Manches- 
ter piece goods, cowries, and spirits, was about the price of a 
negro. These cotton goods, made expressly for the slave trade, 
are slave-manufactured in Lancashire. 

Jackson, Riley, Captain Lyon, Hitter, Browne, Burkhardt, 
Colonel Leake, Br. Holroyd, Dr. Bowring, are among the tra- 
vellers, residents, and writers on Africa during the last fifty 
years, who testify to the foreign and home slave trade. Caravan 
after caravan of negroes has been marched across the burning 
sands of Africa, to supply the 50,000 slaves required for the 
slave-owners of the East, while ship after ship transported the 
150,000 landed on the slave plantations of the West. 

6 



122 THE FACTS ; OE, 

" The whole, or the greater part of that immense continent," 
said Bryan Edwards, "is a field of warfare and desolation, 
a wilderness in which the inhabitants are wolves to each 
other." 

Bruce, who was in Abyssinia in 1*110, said : "The Gromach 
men are all killed, and are then mutilated, parts of their bodies 
being carried away as trophies ; several of the old mothers are 
also killed, while others, frantic with fear and despair, kill them- 
selves. The boys and girls of a more tender age are then car- 
ried off in brutal triumph." 

Mungo Park describes the slave war between the Kings of 
Bambarra and Kaarta, where the population of three, villages were 
put to death. 

Prince Henry of Portugal made Anthony Gonzales, the Portu- 
guese, in 1442, carry back to Africa the ten Moors he had seized. 
He did so, but got gold dust and ten negroes in return, which he 
sold. This opened the gold mine : all nations followed, the 
slave trade began and is still in full blast. 

Bartholomew de Las Casas was a Bishop. He loved the 
Indian and hated the negro, hence he tried to make them change 
places. 

I believe the Indians would have been better off in slavery. 

Hunting-fields don't develop agriculture or industry. 

Lord Muncaster, Grosvenor Smith, Major Gray, Captain 
Moresby, Major Denham, Clapperton, Commodore Owen, Mr. 
Ashmun, Laird, Rankin, Colonel Nicholls, Mr. Oldfield, Captain 
Cook, Canot, and several others, have most minutely described 
the wretched state of the negro in his own land. Each has 
testified to the low state of civilization — and did not most of 
these travellers and writers look through English eyes and aboli- 
tion spectacles, they would all and every one admit that the 
American slaves were as far above the African freemen as is the 
English peasant above the Laplander. At any rate, these dis- 
tinguished travellers have fairly shown that in Africa the Exeter 
Hall revolutionists have a far wider pasture for their abolition 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 123 

shepherds to evangelize the African slave — than in the United 
States of America. 

" Nobility has seldom sprung from virtue — virtue still more 
rarely from nobility/" wrote Francis Bacon. 

So true Christianity, true benevolence, true friendship for the 
African, does not forsooth emanate from the noble brotherhood 
who show their sympathy for a foreign race by falsifying their 
own kindred. 

" The Americans, in their conduct toward their slaves, are 
traitors to the cause of human liberty, foul destructors of the 
Democratic principle, and blasphemers of the great and sacred 
name they pretend to recognize," was the bitter language of 
Daniel O'Connell. Quoting these sentiments as a text, Francis 
Wyse, in 1844, penned some fifty pages of the boiled down 
calumnies on American slavery in his three-volumed work on the 
United States, which, if written with an abler pen, would be 
worthy of Thomas Collie Grattan. 

" Facility to believe ; doubt to contradict ; good to gain ; 
sloth to search and seeking things in words," are the traits that 
mark such minds. They abuse America as naturally as they 
praise England. " The only pleasure which can be conforma- 
ble to nature is that which knows no satiety. That measure 
has been discarded by the Wyses and Grattans of the day. 

Remembering the St. Domingo massacre, the Jacquerie of 
France, the slave revolt of Germany, Napoleon said, " Had aliy 
of your philosophical liberals come out of Egypt to proclaim 
liberty to the blacks or the Arabs, I would have hung him up at 
the masthead." Whately says that many " well meaning men 
voted against the abolition of the slave trade, because it was 
advocated by some partisans of the French Revolution." Eng- 
land, however, fifty years ago, threw up her hand, and Spain 
and Portugal continued the game where all the cards were 
trumps. 

From 1st July, 182*7, to 1st July, 1830, the British consul 
reported 150,000 negroes imported into the single port of Rio 



124 THE FACTS ; OR, 

de Janeiro! The "Patriot" newspaper, 25th June, 1838, 
estimated that 60,000 arrived there that year ! and Bahia, 
Pernambuco, Maranham, and Para took 32,000 more. Even 
women were embarked in the selling of negros. Donna Maria 
de Cruz, daughter of the notorious Gomez, Governor of Prince's 
Island, made a fortune in the traffic. 

Wilberforce threw his anti-slavery mantle over Buxton, May 
24, 1821 — two years after, the debate opened in parliament with 
such animation as to frighten the colouists. The planters felt 
with the old adage, " Save us from our friends, and we will take 
care of our enemies." 

The "Jamaica Journal," June 28, 1823, boils over with 
indignation. The opposition was as bitter as it was just : 

"We will pray the Imperial Parliament to amend their origin, -which ia 
bribery; to cleanse their consciences, which are corrupt; to throw off their 
disguise, which is hypocrisy ; to teach with their false allies, who are the 
saints ; and finally, to banish from among them all the purchased rogues, 
who are three-fourths of their members." 

Lord Brougham said one hundred slaves were killed in Deme- 
rara by the soldiers, in consequence of the debate in Parliament 
having excited the negroes to rise. 

The Buxtonians will not even now admit that too much force 
throws out the wedge. Their little knowledge of the effect of 
freedom proves a very dangerous thing to the negro. The more 
they cut down the trees, the wider appears the forest. 

The elder tree grows as much in three years as the oak in 
twelve ; but at thirty years the oak continues its growth while 
the elder has ceased to advance. These trees are fit emblems of 
the two races. Freedom to the African lightens up his narrow- 
brain for a short period only, to be the darker afterward. 
Like the mirage on his sun-burnt sands — admiring the benefits 
of liberty he never reaches — he sees in it theory, but he cannot 
practise it. 

Negroes were always slaves, and always will be until Provi 



A.T WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 125 

dence so changes nature's law as to give them more mind. It is 

a question simply of brains. 

The Negro has nine cubic inches less of brains than the Teutonic 
race ! 

The Hottentot and the Peruvian has seventy-five inches ; the 
Mexican seventy-nine — the negro eighty-three ; while God, for 
some great end, has given ninety-two cubic inches of brains to 
the Caucasian race ! 

"The average of cubic inches of the brains of barbarian 
tribes," says Philips, "is eighty-four." 

Human nature never changes ; if so, it would cease — no mat- 
ter what the language, the negro always takes that peculiar 
intonation with him, his lisp is as natural as his smell. 

Nature is the grandest of studies. Trace the world through 
fishes, reptiles, birds, animals, to man — through the paleozoic, 
the silurian, the chalk and the coal. Water, first hence 
fishes. The Tertiary epoch brought land, mountains and 
animals. 

Geology shows us the different strata of the earth. Ethnol- 
ogy teaches us the different strata of man ; the negro is the 
paleozoic. 

As younger children become more precocious by having older 
ones to play with, so to a certain extent, the negro finds 
improvement by associating with the Teuton. 

In Africa the negro is half-starved, therefore badly developed. 
In America he is well fed, hence his plumpness and good condi- 
tion. 

"Wild horses, cattle, asses and other brutes are greatly 
improved by domestication ; but neither climate nor food can 
transform an ass into a horse, or a buffalo into an ox," writes 
Gliddon, in his " Types of Man P 

Neither can a negro become a Caucasian, or a Saxon, or an 
Englishman, or an American. There is a long stage between 
each mile--stone. We have tried them for ten generations in the 
United States, and find the negro still the negro ! 



126 THE FACTS ; OE, 

The filling of a cistern will not make a perpetual fountain. 
11 Fame, like a river, bears up what is light, and sinks what is solid." 
The abolition stream needs as much purification as the Thames. 
Had the slaves been in England, how different would have been 
the conduct of Parliament. But some thousand miles away lent 
enchantment to the picture. False affidavits could be made 
without detection. One case of cruelty could be easily exag- 
gerated into a hundred. 

The abolition Filibusters showed wonderful energy — vigor — 
firmness of purpose. Buxton's maxim was that man must not 
mistake difficulties for impossibilities. Such steadfastness of 
purpose were worthy of better results. 

They were men of weight and measure. They were prophets, 

and honored even in their own country. They let their lights so 

shine before the British people as to darken everything American. 

11 The lowest of the virtues attract the vulgar mass — the middle 

ones they admire — of the highest they have no conception." 

The abolitionists appealed to the lower state of the people — 
and, coming so closely upon the heels of the Reform Bill, they 
succeeded. 

Ireland was forgotten — she was too near home — besides, 
her people were white. " Oh," said O'Connell on Irish wrongs, 
" I wish that we were Hack!'- What a commentary on the 
state of feeling then existing — that a British member of Parlia- 
ment, even in jest — should wish himself a negro — in order to 
get the same attention that the negroes received ! 

"Handy Andy's" motives were good — but his actions were 
decidedly bad. 

Brother Jonathan has inherited from his Abolition Father 
the stain of negro slavery. What will he do with it ? Miss 
Murray, writing from Boston (page 48), says : "Christianity 
will, and must subdue it ; not by teaching us to vilify and per- 
secute those less fortunate, our brethren who have had the curse 
of human possessions entailed upon them, but by enlightening the 
darkened, and instructing the ignorant." 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LTE ? 127 

Christian slavery is more exalted than barbarian freedom. For 
proof of this, compare the death-bed of King Gezo, in Negro- 
land, with the black children of the slave States. Barbarism 
precedes civilization — mythology comes before theology — super- 
stition before religion— ideal before the real— natural before the 

spiritual ; the superior follows the inferior throughout history 

so freedom must succeed slavery : association succeeds progres- 
sion, and development follows association. Creation is a study. 
Man is linked with everything in the animal, mineral, and vege- 
table world. The grain of corn is planted in the spring, it pro- 
gresses, it assimilates, it develops. Man eats it in the morning 

at night it becomes part of the blood, the flesh, and the bone, 
and the next day a portion of the brain, perchance a human 
thought working out some patent reaping machine. The world 
is worked on a wonderful system. The Creator made the negro 
as well as his master, and in making him he gave him bodily 
strength, to make up for his mental weakness. 

The old kings and patriarchs of the Bible were bad men. In 
our day such crimes would have sent them to the gallows. 
Madame Tussaud would have had them all in the chamber of 
horrors. Their bondsmen did not fare as well as our slaves. 
Good comes out of evil. Astrology prepared the road for 
astronomy — alchemy preceded chemistry — soothsaying foresha- 
dowed prophecy — and priestly traditions came before the won- 
derful realities of modern science. 

Where there is now land all was once water — and where there 
is now water all will sometime become land. Time is the level- 
ler. Time will emancipate the negro. The Almighty's ways 
are all his own. 

Corn and flowers may yet grow abundantly on the African 
desert. The Gospel of Jesus will yet Christianize the heathen. 
The lion and the lamb will some day lie down together. Elec- 
tricity will perhaps conduct the locomotive at two hundred miles 
the hour, as easily as it now sends messages as many thousands 
at a flash. Some invention will yet be made for this mysterious 



128 THE FACTS ; OK, 

agency. Lightning may yet conduct away all disease from the 
home of man. The air itself may be controlled with as much 
facility as the navigator sails his ship upon the waters. Time is 
the greatest inventor. 

Four millions of slaves must not be set free in a month. 

There are seven ages in nature as in man. " All the world's 
a stage." The anti-slavery sentiment grew from the " puleing 
babe " to the second childhood in less than a generation. The 
idea was grand and noble. 

Fashion is all powerful. Custom is a tyrant. Christianity 
was as pure as a mountain lake — clear as crystal at the fountain. 
Now, mark how polluted have contending creeds and sectarian 
rancor made the stream. The gilded church, the luxurious pew, 
the gold-clasped Bible, the flowing surplice of the apostle, and 
the Pharasaical prayer, are among the worldly things thrown in 
to corrupt its living waters. That publican's simple appeal won 
for him at once an audience. 

Christianity in all ages is that beacon on the mountain. It is 
always shining — all see it, all feel it — but there are many roads. 
The light still burns. Some go in railways, some by hand-carts 
—one man takes a saddle-horse, another a wheelbarrow. This 
sect prefers an omnibus, that a canal-boat. Some go up one side 
the mountain, others the other. There are now twenty-four 
hundred and ninety-nine roads to reach the beacon. 

A school-boy in our time knows more geography than Jacob. 
The authors of the Book of all knowledge knew nothing of 
astronomy, history, geology, philosophy, or geography ! 

When we turn to the elements that are alleged to bring peace 
and love and forgiveness to our neighbors, what discord floats 
around us. Look at the sectaries of Christianity ; are there not 
divisions in the church ? North separating from South ? Is it 
not a sporadic case ? The great mass of Methodists have 
parted, the next in numbers, the Baptists, have broken asunder. 
Is there not disturbance among the Presbyterians ? " Does not 
the circle of discord," said the Earl St. Vincent in the House of 



AT WHOSE DOOE DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 129 

Lords, " enlarge itself daily," so that we have demagogies in 
religion as well as in politics ? 



Custom can make the church ungodly, as well as make one 
people dislike another people, because of the bondage of still 
another people. 

I owe you five shillings was once law — now four pages are 
required for a power of attorney. Four pages of " administra- 
tions, executors, and assigns." Four pages of aforesaids and the 
whereases — four pages of legal forms instead of five simple 
words, before you can sell a ship, transfer a house, or buy a 
farm. 

Custom is all-powerful — lawyers were paid by the line ; so two 
men, Wilberforce and Buxton, introduced the custom of depre- 
ciating white men, and commending black men. Custom has 
organized a community of doctors. 

Rest, regularity, recreation, diet, exercise, pure water, pure 
air, early hours, are nature's physicians, Hygeia was the goddess 
of health, but custom has planted in every street an apothecary 
shop — a drug receptacle — resembling so many blisters on society, 
ulcers on the social system. Esculapius was the god of medi- 
cine. Hippocrates and Galen lived before Paracelsus, with his 
horrible calomel. Then came, I forget the name, with his anti- 
mony. Harvey saw the blood circulate ; Jener mitigated the 
smallpox ; but Hahnemann introduced homoeopathy, to the 
dismay of the pill-maker. Now Wilson holds the mirror up to 
nature with his water-cure at Malvern. 

The clerical, the legal, and the medical professions are the crutches 
on which ignorant, discordant, and diseased humanity hobhle through 
the world. Remove the first, there would be more religion ; 
remove the second, there would be less discord ; remove the 
third, and more people would live to a ripe old age. Three 
college-bred practitioners control the Englishman. The clergy- 
man, the doctor, and the lawyer. The one takes care of his 

6* 



130 the facts; or, 

soul, the other his body, the last his purse. Yet, what could we 
do without them ? 

If England means what she proposes, no better time than now 
can offer to show some demonstration beside proclamations. 

If Lord Shaftesbury's party mean to try the feeling of England, 
let Parliament be petitioned against the importation of a single 
bale of slave-grown cotton, or hogshead of slave-grown sugar, 
for twelve months. Charity begins at home. 

When the young man asked how he could enter the Kingdom 
of Heaven, our Saviour told him to keep the commandments — 
" I have done this from my youth upward." " Thou art near 
the kingdom ; but, in order to enter in, must sell thy estates — 
give to the poor and follow me." When England follows this 
advice, America will believe in her sincerity — not before. When 
the Duchess of Sutherland gives ovations to Mrs. II. B. Stowe, 
she is very near the kingdom — but she must sell her estates, and 
then purchase emancipation at the market price. 

Some three millions of the people of England get what they 
shall eat, what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be 
clothed, from the product of slave-grown cotton. They are 
more interested in the question than those who drink port, eat 
woodcocks, and dine in palaces. Let Palmerston call a monster 
meeting of these operatives, and put the question, " All in favor 
of emancipation and no cotton — say aye !" Deep silence reigns 
— "All for cotton, and no emancipation !" The response would 
shake the empire. 

When England will show how she can exist without slave- 
grown cotton and slave-grown sugar, she will prove the consis- 
tency of her course. 

Were you to ask me if we had never seen a negro in the 
country, would you introduce slavery in the United States ? I 
would answer most decidedly, no. Would you emancipate those 
now in America ? Most decidedly, yes, when it can be done 
without ruining the planter, debasing the slave, and retarding 
civilization ! 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SHST (?) LIE? 131 

Are you in favor of opening the slave trade ? No, not as 
carried on by the English, the Spanish, and Portuguese. But 
under some well arranged system of emigration, yes — but they 
must not be called slaves. The Quaker wouldn't whip the cur 
that stole his meat, but cried out mad dog, and the animal was 
soon killed. 

When you wish to harm an object or a man, call him or it 
names. Who dares to speak on sacred history without first 
apologizing for his sentiments ? 

Thus the adulterous old King Henry introduced Protestantism 
because he wanted another wife — the cry of infidelity meets 
every man who has the manliness to think \ 

Writing on Mr. Buxton's motion, February 22, regardiug 
West India immigration, the "Times" says: "Europe must 
have sugar, and has shown plainly enough that if Jamaica can- 
not produce it, Cuba may. If Cuba secures the privilege, not 
only slavery but the slave trade itself continues to flourish. If 
Jamaica wins the market, Cuba and the slave trade go down 
together." 

American emancipation would overthrow the British Govern- 
ment. Slaves grow the cotton ; set them free, and, like 
Jamaica, the plantations would soon be jungles. Desolation 
there would show spindles rusting, operatives starving in manu- 
facturing districts, civil war in America among the slaves, and 
civil war in England among the operatives. 

When the Emancipation Bill was passed, statesmen were 
green ; we expect better laws now they are ripe. Emancipate 
the slaves, and England would soon see that, unknown to her- 
self, she was a sleeping partner in the slave. 

The African will not work without a master. The European 
combines and succeeds. The Asiatic race, also, understand the 
power in part of working in concert. But the African has no 
idea of a joint-stock enterprise. They were always bondsmen. 
They will always so continue. But they must not be called 
slaves. The word stinks almost as bad as the negro— not quite 



132 THE FACTS ; OK, 

— for the negro's pores are always open ! Enslaving debases 
the enslaver, but thus far has elevated the slave. The Africans 
never combine, therefore it is absurd, under the present system, 
to fear a rising in the South. Persians, Asiatics, and Tartars 
have had armies, but who ever heard such a thing as an African 
army, an African regiment, an African bank, an African joint- 
stock association of any kind ? Be assured the negro is a one- 
horse mind, with a one-story intellect. Under guidance they 
will work — alone they wallow in idleness. 

Nature never intended the negro to be our master, or even 
our equal, but our servant. Nature's plans are simple ; her 
results are sublime. Every infant born is another link in nature's 
chain. Progression is her first law. The sun comes on and 
leaves us at the horizon, but is always moving. Little things 
make great things. Pay breaks by degrees, and night comes 
under a regular law. Nature's law destroys the doctrine of 
chance. 

Each death is a birth ; each grave a cradle. Men and ani- 
mals are full of living things the moment that life leaves the 
body. Each race eats up the other race. As grand as the 
study of astronomy or geology is the study of human change. 
Dark-skinned nations are not up with our age. They always 
miss the ferry-boat — they never arrive in time. As minerals 
assume the angular shape — animals and vegetables the spherical 
— so nature makes strong the negro body, to make up for his 
infantile mind. 

Slavery suits that race. Abolition is the Satan that crawls 
into his Eden to ruin his peace of mind. Slavery is good for 
negroes but fatal to politics. It killed the Whig party ; des- 
troyed the Know-No things, and will stand at the grave of the 
Democrats next campaign. As the sweetest things become the 
sourest — as the handsomest women may become the greatest 
scolds — so may the cherished ideas of the Democratic party prove 
its ruin. 

In Africa, slaves are wretched; in America, they are happy. 
Ask a slave if he would go back to Africa, and he would scout 
the idea. Go into the southern States ; observe the attach- 
ment that grows up between master and slave. The planters 
call them " Uncle" and "Aunty ;" and the " Massa and missis" 
from their lips is spoken in kind and affectionate words. 

It is considered contemptible for a planter to sell his slaves, 
unless obliged to part with them through financial embarrasment. 
Pierce Butler, the husband of Fanny Kemble, has just sold his 
estate in Georgia to pay his debts. Some 400 slaves were dis- 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 133 

posed of, but the husband was not separated from his wife, nor 
the mother from her young child. This was the express stipu- 
lation _ of the sale. In South Carolina, North Carolina, and 
Georgia, when slave estates are sold, this custom is universal. 
Public opinion rules the law. 

The " Times " published in full the "New York Tribune's" 
description of this sale, and the next day gave a leader on the 
subject, which dealt much more kindly with the slave-owner than 
was the case some time ago. It concludes thus : 

"The best point about this sale is that the families were not separated. 
The Philadelphian, Mr. Butler, made this concession to the feelings of 
those among whom he lived. The old men and women were sold with 
their grown-up progeny, the husbands with their wives, and the little child- 
ren with their parents. The writer hints that by this mode more was 
made out of the stock; but we are willing to believe that it is the result 
of a dawning consciousness among the masters. The scenes which took 
place at every auction, when negroes were ruthlessly separated, the remon- 
strances of the North, and of the world in general, and the efforts of some 
of the clergy, in whom the spirit of Christianity has not been entirely 
quenched by the habit of looking on blacks as inferior beings, have led to 
the practice of selling the families as much as possible together, and the 
slave-owners of late have taken no little credit for their progress in 
humanity. But is this the only element which at all palliates the sad and 
degrading spectacle? If any one wishes to see bow low the white man 
may be brought by unlimited power to use human beings for gain, let him 
read the life-like description of the southern planters, and see into what a 
class the increase of the cotton trade has changed the gentlemen of the 
Carolinas and Georgia." 

The " Press," of April 16, devotes an editorial to bitter reflec- 
tions on America. The concluding paragraph will illustrate 
what I have endeavored to describe as the tone of the ministerial 
journal toward America on this slave question : 

"This 'pure democracy' — this model El Dorado, after which Mr. Bright 
seeks to shape the policy of England — has been vauntingly called by its 
most eloquent orators 'The natural ally of slavery.' In Congress and 
Senate it has upheld the revolting traffic of the South. The free-suffrage 
convention at Rhode Island called heaven and earth to witness its readi- 
ness to encounter the horrors of war rather than surrender the right of 
universal suffrage, and meanwhile defranchised such of the Rhode Islanders 
as had an infinitessimal drop of African blood in their veins. In the con- 
ventions of Michigan and Iowa, Democracy declared all men equal, with 
the exception of the colored inhabitants. We are reminded by this boast- 
ing of freedom— this glorying in universal suffrage — this trumpeting of 
liberty and equality — of that scene where the noblest woman of France 
on ascending the scaffold turned toward a statue of Liberty, placed beside 
the guillotine, and exclaimed: 'Oh, Liberty, what crimes have been com- 
mitted in thy name !' What means that American slang now so largely 
imported into political discussions among ourselves, ' the dignity of labor,' 



[34 THE FACTS ; OK, 



< the equality of all,' ' the extending of the area of freedom ? It is the 
hypocrisy of speech— the gilding of the slave's chains— the dust which 
the Yankee tries to throw into European eyes. In America, we have a 



that Bright and Co. contend for, in suffrage, in political power— neither an 
Aristocracy, nor a Prelacy, nor a State Church, nor a Queen. Yet this sacred 
democracy hugs to its bosom the most execrable system ol slavery that 
ever polluted God's earth ! Slavery is a deep and detestable evil— a greater 
evil to the whites than to the wretched blacks— morally, socially, politically 
evil It seems to be suffered to continue in America that the partisans of 
democracy and republicanism may learn that their favorite political heaven 
has blacker clouds on it than far less boastful institutions, and that there 
is no good reason for uprooting our old English royal oak and transplant- 
ing into England that miserable furze bush of democracy, in which nestle 
and grow up many more venomous reptiles than we have any liking for. 
Our English people, we are persuaded, think so. Bad as we.are, England 
is an entire stranger to the slave market." 

Are the Wilberforcekes aware that the public auctioneer at 
the South is looked upon as a necessary evil, and with the same 
feelings of contempt as you look upon the common hangman ? 
That public opinion is so much in favor of the slave, that a 
a white man gets justice with difficulty ? That a larger number 
of slaves are members of the church iu proportion to population 
than the whites ? That nothing has done so much to retard 
education — schools — teachers — among them, as the violent ti- 
rades against their masters by the " Uncle Tom party ?" 

In the order of nature, there must be sensation before think- 
ing, creeping before walking, crying before language, coarseness 
belbre culture, superstition before intellectual education, experi- 
ence before wisdon, and slavery before freedom, for those dark 
races that the Creator made to labor under the guidance of the 
white man. 

Buffon and Linnaeus have the honor of commencing the science 
of man ; Cuvier followed ; then Blumenbach ; but Wilberforce 
introduced the science of negro-abolition, as Sir John Hawkins 
did that of negro slavery. 

Tzatzoe, the Caffir chief, dining with Buxton, expressed sur- 
prise to see that in the streets of London, donkeys did not 
receive the same humane and honorable treatment as horses ! 

People will have different opinions on different subjects. 

Plato, Galileo, Newton, Angelo, Locke, Hume, Pope, Bacon, 
Pitt, Voltaire, Cowper, Macaulay, Irving, must have considered 
matrimony slavery, else these distinguished men would not be 
on the record of old bachelors. 

Animals came into existence with a coat of fur ; but man 
came in naked. The animals remain as they were first made ; 
man has been daily advancing. American slavery is one step 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LD3 ? 135 

toward daylight for the negro. The retail slanderer becomes the 
wholesale reviler. The early abolitionists must have abused their 
relatives before anathematizing their neighbors. 



Go into the cold cheerless huts of the English, the Irish, and 
Scottish peasant — note his scanty furniture— his cold hearth- 
stone—notice the quantity and quality of his food — trace the 
care on his low brow and corrugated features— remember that 
one in thirty of the entire population is a pauper — that one in 
twelve of the births last year was a bastard — test the truth as 
these these things are shown, and then admit that charity begins 
at home. Why is it, when intelligent Englishmen go to the slave 
States, they come back delighted with America? Why are 
their views so changed ? The Hon. Miss Murray was as- 
tonished to find things so different from the way that she had 
been taught. 

Carnot says that so far from sleeping on feather beds in Africa, 
the slaves seldom have the luxury of a mat or boar hide. 

The Mandingo chiefs are the most civilized, yet their " beds, 
divans, and sofas are heaps of mud, covered with untanned skins 
for curtains, while logs of wood serve as bolsters !" In America 
they fare better. 

I like consistency. Many of our most rabid anti-mexi — our 
Quakers, our long-faced philanthropists — continually take money 
from the slave-owners for goods sold. Is it not as bad as when 
a planter sells slaves, takes the money, and buys merchandise of 
the abolitionist — the abolitionist knowing it was slave money ? 
When debts are owing from southern States, abolitionists have 
never been known to refuse taking slaves in payment; that is, 
they were of course sold, and they took the money ! 'i 
same people who profess so much sympathy, will not sit in the 
same pew at church — ride in the same omnibus or railway car- 
riage — not allow a negro to come any nearer to them than they 
can help. ; Tis hard to reduce their maxims to actual life. 
The "Times" has lately given an instance of the elopement of a 
beautiful girl in Detroit with a huge negro. The description 
was revolting. 



One point more — when English gentlemen open this matter 
with Americans with such strong feelings, are they aware of the 
magnitude of the subject? Do they think of its extent? 
When speaking of their national debt, it looks to them an Atlas 



136 



THE FACTS ; OR, 



load, but the emancipation of some 4,000,000 slaves but as an 
every-day occurrence ! 

I have overhauled the Parliamentary record of the West 
Indian compromise. The inequality of the price of the slaves in 
the several colonies is a marked feature. McCulloch is my 
authority for the following table : 

" Distribution of slave compensation. The commissioners for the appor- 
tionment of £20,000,000 granted by Parliament as compensation to slave- 
owners, under the 3 and 4 William IV., cap. *73, issued the following table, 
showing the average value of a slave in each colony ; the number of 
slaves in each ; the total value of the slaves ; supposing the annual value 
of each were realized, and the proportion of the £20,000,000 received by 
each colony : 




4,000,000 at 500 dollars each, is 2,000,000,000 dollars, one- 
half of your national debt ! 

This is property, handed down by Englishmen to Englishmen, 
from father to son, from American to American, for generations. 
The planters have grown up with the slaves. They have no 
other occupation. The 350,000 slave-owners having no other 
means of support, look with suspicion and distrust on the hollow 
demonstrations of those who would deprive them of their pro- 
perty, offering nothing but abuse in payment. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 137 

I would advise a planter to sell his slaves to the warm- 
hearted Christian philanthropists, and after he had got the 
money, put on the same long face, picture the cruelty of the 
system, and then advise the anti-slavery purchaser to set them 
all free. Then charity would begin at home. 

The lowest class of the community in Canada, the Canadians 
will tell you, are the free negroes. 

Is it not the same in Nova Scotia ? I never saw a more 
degraded, lot of negroes than at the negro colony at Halifax. 
Emancipation there again has proved abortive. 

I write from memory, but I am under the impression that 
during the last war (1812), a British man-of-war seized a lot of 
some hundred slaves on the Roanoke and carried them to Nova 
Scotia, some to Halifax, some to the Loch Lomond settlement, St. 
John, N.B. The government gave them land, and seed and 
culture for a fair start, and what has been the result ? Just 
what it has always been and will always be — degradation. 
They have tried it for two generations ; when they have money 
they drink and sleep it away. Thrift, industry, honesty are not 
the qualities of the African negro. 

Brooms, baskets and shingles constitute the commerce of 
these people — they are good butchers, hair-dressers and capital 
melon-venders. 

Enslaving negroes was making Christians out of idolaters. 

Africa was made for that unfortunate race. The land, like 
the negro's mind, is a desert. Emigrating to America was like 
passing from darkness to light — from death to life. 

I am not a slave-owner, nor have I any desire to be. A near 
relative of mine inherited a large estate with some hundreds of 
slaves. When he became a preacher of the Methodist Episco- 
cal church, he liberated all and reduced his princely fortune to 
a limited income. I am a Bostonian— the very hot-bed of abo- 
lition where we have abolition clubs, abolition societies, aboli- 
tion churches, abolition schools, as well as abolition rum-shops, 
abolition poverty, and abolition crime ! And I have just 
noticed these resolutions, reported in the " New York Herald," 
as having been passed at the Anti-Slavery Convention held at 
Albany, by the Boston abolitionists, February 1, 1859 : 

Resolved— That in advocating a dissolution of the Union, the abolition- 
ists are justified by every precept of the Gospel— every principle of moral- 
ity, and every desire of humanity. . 

Resolved— Wirt, the Union is a covenant with Death, and ought to be 
annulled— an agreement with Hell which a just God cannot permit to 
stand and that it is the paramount duty of all to seek its overthrow. 



138 



THE FACTS J OR, 



This proves that my Bostonian fellow citizens of the sable 
sympathy party, are worthy of being disciples of the " great 
and good Wilberforce." 

Let me ask one question. If the Union was dissolved (an 
impossibility), does that alleviate the evil? Will that better 
the matter ? Would Othello lose his occupation ? 

I remember once hearing the eloquent treason of Phillips. He 
pictures Tell and the tyrant Gessler, Tell represents abolition ; 
Gessler slavery. " We have fired," said he, " our arrow and killed 
our child, but we have still another, which we will hurl at the 
Union and the Church!" These Garrisonians are honest in their 
Faith. They are insane on that question as Brigham Young 
is on Mormonism, or Jackson Davis on the spirit-rappers. There 
is ever a kind of madness in intellect, and there is plenty of 
genius in genuine isms. These men may yell for dissolution but 
they must not touch the Union of our States. No northern 
abolitionist or southern fire-eater dare act. The Constitution 
allows them to talk, so let them howl and scream. Let them 
rant and swear, and curse. The Union will live in spite of the 
death-rattle croak of the Union-destroying ravens. 

No, the Union is safe— mark the vision — the acquaintance — 
the courtship — the doubt and fear — the association of States— 
the dowry — the children— the grandchildren— observe how 
they cliug to the parent stein — the constitutional oak. How 
small the acorn, and how massive the tree— how deep-rooted the 
trunk, and how wide-spread the branches. Like the great ban- 
yan in Calcutta's garden, towering high in air, our American 
banyan stands out, the patriarch of the race. Note its hundred 
branches, like a general with his officers, regiment, companies 
—like an admiral, with flag-ship and fleet. The Union is safe 
in spite of those who would do it harm. Virginia, the first, is 
the centre of a hundred States. 

Americans bathe their feet in both oceans, and lave their 
brows in gulfs on either side. Oceans, lakes, gulfs, valleys, have 
been joined by canals, steamboats, railways, and telegraphs, all 
binding the Union of my native land. Friendship for England 
is strong in America. I want England to feel the same toward 
America. 

The age of painting— the age of gunpowder— the age of 
printing— the age of Newtonian philosophy— the age of Napo- 
leon's conquests— may have passed, but the age of oar Union's 
brightest history is to come. Possibly it may be Emancipation, 
but not in my time. 

The Crimean dangers repaired the military service of England. 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 139 

The Indian mutiny will open Hindostan to commerce and pro- 
gress — so will the southern States take measures, when it can 
be done, to ameliorate the condition of the slaves. 



Several friends have assured me that these letters have been 
too disconnected to convey good reasoning. Suppose they have; 
that is my style. If they don't like it, they better not read them. 
When you are conversing over the dinner-table you don't make a 
set speech, and I commenced these articles in a conversational 
way. You can read them all at once or take them apart. 
They go. as well backward as forward, or you can commence in 
the middle. 

Nature may never repent anything, but writers always do. I 
never said there was any new ideas expressed herein — and of 
course there will be some repetition. 

In making these notes, I hope I have argued fairly and in 
good temper. 1 trust that no personalities have been intro- 
duced, and that I have condensed the question into readable 
shape ; and for fear that I may be considered an advocate for 
continual slavery, I will close these comments by Baying that I 
would do away with this Christian mode of civilizing the heel hen 
— but I would carry my reforms further. I would also do away 
with the rum-shops — close the opium dens. I would abolish 
courts aud prisons — I would have no bastards — no paupers — no 
cyprians— no drunkards — I would do away with dice-box and 
cards — with envy, hatred, jealousy, slander, and all uncharit- 
ableness — I would seek to improve mankind by sweeping away 
vice and crime, and substituting virtue and happiness — and 
most assuredly I would do away with slavery ! 

But these things commenced — continued — and will not end. 

Cain murdered — Lot sotted — David Uriahized — Moses plot- 
ted — Jacob cheated — Solomon seduced — Peter lied— Judas be- 
trayed — and all were slave-owners ! I consider myself better 
than all those miserable sinners. Our age is an improvement on 
theirs. 

The present is brighter than the past— no murders now be- 
tween Protestant and Catholic — no Sabine rapes— no innocents 
massacred— no sequestrated land — no exiles— not one man 
stained by the zeal of state. Negro-mania— negro-phobia — 
negro-pathy is dying out ; aud when it is very dead, England 
will have a much better opinion of the only true friend she has 
on the face of the globe — America. 

I leave off where I began, by sayiug that of all things oi 



140 THE FACTS ; OR, 

which the Exeter Hall people are most ignorant, the question 
of American Slavery stands most prominent. 

Europe having no other sins to lay at our door rolls this spe- 
culation of her youth before our gate. 

The whole argument can be squeezed into a filbert. 

American slavery is the first great stepping stone from African 
barbarism to Christian civilization. Take it up point by point. 

Physically — how meagre, thin, long and chopfallen is the poor, 
half-clad, half-starved savage as you find him a prisoner of 
war in Negroland. How happy, contented, well developed, 
strong, hearty, the well-clothed, well-fed negro slave in America. 

Mental/)/, look at the miserable weak-minded animal in Africa 
who never did enough work to keep a snail alive — who knows 
nothing of Bible Schools, Bible Societies or Christian preachers, 
and contrast him in his improved state on a southern plantation. 

Commercially, the African savage never benefited mankind, as 
an African savage, but as an American slave he has grown corn, 
cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco and coffee, and thus helped to civilize 
the world more than all the missionaries in Christendom. 

•ncialhi, the same ai "-'s labor in 

America regulates exchanges, rules markets, stimulates finances 
— but iu Africa he was worse than aothing. 

Mechanically, what arts or what instruments, what 

ingenuity has the negro iu his barbarian state ever shown? 
Nothing. But under American .-la very he has sa^n in the white 
man a higher order of mankind, and there are now mechanics, 
carpenters, smiths aud workers in metals among the slaves. 

Socially, the American slaves never eat their own or other 
people's children. "We have no cannibals — no human being 
mutilated over the funeral pile (slaves are too valuable). They 
go to church, they sing, they laugh, shoot birds, read tracts 
(not abolition, for that teaches them to make them). In fact 
socially the American slave is just the reverse of the African 
savage. 

Morally, all the foregoing comes under this head. The barba- 
rian meets civilized man and improves as far as lie can — educa- 
tion may develop but cannot originate mind. Color is not the 
only thing that marks him — you must first put inside his skull 
nine cubic inches more of brain. He may possess the two hundred 
and forty-eight bones — the four hundred muscles, the fifty-six 
joints on hands and feet — the twenty miles of arteries that 
mark the white man — and those who ever came near them in hot 
weather will testify that they also have the three millions of 
pores ! But the brain, the organ of the mind, is not there — in 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE ? 141 

quality or quantity. Blood is not always red. It is sometimes 
blue in birds, white in fishes, yellow in reptiles, transparent in 
insects, but all colors in man. 

There is a difference between construction and destruction — 
innovation and renovation. 

It required all plants, all trees, all fish, all birds, all beasts to 
make man, and yet your true abolitionist thinks he can change 
the order of nature. 

The best mode of emancipating the slaves in America, is for 
Parliament to stop the cotton. If it don't make a revolution 
the first year — stop it the second. The Broughams, the Buxtons 
the Sutherlands, the Hugos of abolition should pass these reso- 
lutions: 

Resolved, That from this day we will not wear a slave-grown 
cotton shirt — sleep between slave-grown cotton sheets — wipe 
our faces with slave-grown cotton towels — use slave grown cot- 
ton clothes on our children — or slave-grown cotton handker- 
chiefs; that we will not wear a particle of clothing — walk on a 
single carpet — or have anything to do with any. article that re- 
quires a particle of slave-grown cotton in its texture. 

Resolved, That we and our menservants will not drink another 
drop of slave-grown coffee or put another lump of slave-grown 
sugar in our tea. 

Resolved, That we will eat no slave-grown rice, or corn, or 
grain. 

Resolved, That we will never smoke another slave-grown 
cigar — take another pinch of slave-grown snuff or use another 
pipeful of slave-grown tobacco; that the five and a half millions 
sterling revenuereceived for these articles be abolished by pro- 
hibiting them altogether. Until some regulation of this kind is 
resolved upon, I doubt if I shall be able to couvince the south- 
erners that it is for their interest or that of mankind to emanci- 
pate their slaves. They must bear in mind this: in any case the 
Union will stand on the Constitution. We can never be disunited. 
The vane of St. Paul's turns at every wind— North, South, 
East or West — amid storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, joy or sun- 
shine — it moves with the wind— but the old Cathedral stands as 
firm as the rock of ages. The one represents our party politics 
— the other our Union. 

Families may quarrel among themselves, but it is not well for 
a neighbor to make comments or interfere. The Americans may 
every four years turn a national somerset at their conventions, 
but Europeans may be assured they will always strike on their 
feet on the Constitution rock of their country. 



142 the facts; ok, 

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in France is now rendered, 
Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery. 

In America — Constitution, Union, Country ! 



Dissolve the Union! — Never ! When the sun shines at midnight, 
the moon at mid-day — when nature stops a moment to rest, or 
man forgets to be selfish — when flowers lose their odor, and 
trees shed no leaves — when birds talk, and animals laugh — when 
impossibilities are in fashion, the Union may be broken ! 

Dissolve the Union ! No political fire can burn under any 
party crucible with sufficient intensity to melt the rock on 
which the nation stands ! 

There may be men base enough to rob and murder — steal 
coffin-plates, and strike women ; but how degraded must be the 
criminal who could calmly witness the disruption of these sove- 
reign States ? 

Dissolve the Union ! How is it to be accomplished ? How 
divide the national flag ? Who takes the stars — who the stripes ? 

The Bunker Hill monument is at the North — will the South 
share it ? How are you to cut asunder the liocky Mountains — 
the Alleghanies ? and how will you divide the Grand River ? who 
takes Niagara Falls, who the Mammoth Cave ? 

Dissolve the Union! — Destroy our mother, trample on our 
father's tomb, desecrate our children — God forbid ! 

What will they do with the pine of Carolina — the elm of Ash- 
land, and the oak of Marshfield ? Who takes the trunks ? who the 
branches ? 

Dissolve the Union! — What ! divide the Constitution ? Which 
half for the northerners — which the southerners ? And, great 
God ! what will they do with the Declaration of Independence ? 
Rash men, forbear ! for before that dark deed can be perpetrated 
you must divide the grave of Washington ! 

Dissolve the Union ! — Who will pay the public debt ? who is to 
have the national arms ? How is the army to be divided ? 
How the navy ? How are you to manage West Point ? and 
what will you do with General Scott ? 

Dissolve the Union ! — Will each State take back her marble 
block from the Washington Monument ? What is to be done 
with the National Library ? How arrange the relics of the 
Exploring Expedition ? Who takes the Patent Office ? Is free 
trade in revolution to settle the question of the capital invested 
in custom-houses ! 

Dissolve the Union ! Never ; so long as there are sects in 



AT WHOSE DOOR DOES THE SIN (?) LIE? 143 

churches — weeds in gardens — disputes in families — wars with 
nations. No, statesmen of Europe, you may reason — you may 
sneer, you may hope — but that cannot be. Your thrones, your 
courts, your governments will fall and crumble into ruin long ere 
that day when the New World commits the national suicide, 
which you have daily predicted for over eighty years ! 

Dissolve the Union! — Statesmen of England, you know not 
what you say — when we fall you will die — when John Bright 
is President of the Republic of Great Britain by universal suf- 
frage of a contented people — when Congress obliges by law an 
American President to marry a European Princess — when the 
Pope leases Faneuil Hall for his city residence — when Alexander 
of Russia and Napoleon of France are elected senators from 
Arizona — then, statesmen of England, there maybe some hopes 
that your wishes may be realized of seeing the dissolution of the 
United States of America ; but not till then ! Englishmen 
should remember that the children of America arc taught to 
look upon the Union of their country with the same sacred res- 
pect that the children of England are taught to look upon the 
person of their Queen. 

Dissolve the Union ! — What, raise a tornado in the politics of 
the land ! — Bring on a whirlwind around our statesmen ! — 
a typhoon among our States! — a natural earthquake, to destroy 
with the volcanic fires of party strife, the grandest fabric 
ever raised under God by the hands of man ! What will they 
do with the Capitol? The Treasury buildings ? And who shall 
have the White House, the national home of sixteen Presidents? 
Who will take Hail Columbia ? who the Star Spangled lim- 
ner ? How dispose of the national Eagle, and pray who is to 
claim Yankee Doodle ? 

Dissolve the Union! — Impossible! would there be two Repub- 
lics — or two Kingdoms? Would they be friends, or foes? — 
Which would be grander, the eighteen millions or the six ? and 
when the two governments send their ambassadors to for 
courts, which will be the most respected, the representative of the 
white man, or the black ? 

Dissolve the Union ! — Stand off all ye ranters — ye traitors — 
ye parricides — ye coward statesmen — ye craven-hearted knaves, 
leave alone the Bible of our political faith. Thus far I have 
lived a life free from taint. No man, however anxious, can find a 
blemish on my character ; but were the Union of my native 
land a cord, and the power of dissolution vested in one man 
who would consent to do so black a crime as sever it — I would 
crawl on hands and feet from State to State, and if fair fight 



144 



THE FACTS. 



would not arrest his falling hand, I declare unto you. dis- 
unionists of the North, and ye disunionists of the South, I would 
assassinate him ! 

The Republican words — Liberty ! Equality ! Fraternity ! 
under a free translation, signifies to-day in France, Infantry ! 
Cavalry ! Artillery ! In England, Steam ! Gas ! Electricity ! 
While in America we have no meaning but Union ! Constitu- 
tion ! Country ! 



THE END. 



8 Aprl.1860 
















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